Ne Znayu Kuda
by McStories
Summary: After being held by violent aliens for weeks after a mission goes wrong, McCoy and Chekov return to the ship to recover. It's just that simple, and just that impossible. Slash, H/C. Complete!
1. Chapter 1

Warnings: Slash, major h/c (mostly off-screen, but there are serious injuries as the result of ongoing torture, and the beginning stages of starvation), angst and drama. Death of a minor OC)

Notes: This is my Help_Pakistan story. The story is linear, but told in two different lines. There's the imprisonment, and the recovery, and I hope it's easy enough to follow where and when we are at any given scene.

* * *

_Poydi tuda, ne znayu kuda, prinesi to, ne znayu chto._

Go I Know Not Whither and Fetch I Know Not What

-Russian folktale

* * *

The door that leads into their still, silent tomb has rusted hinges that give a deep metal complaining noise every time the door opens.

Len hates that noise. Hates everything about it: the tone and pitch of the grinding metal, the creak of the door, the influx of warm air from the hallway that only makes him feel the cold in this room that much deeper.

Mostly, of course, he hates that noise because of what follows it.

There's something so ridiculously insidious about pain. Len would have thought that he'd develop some immunity towards it eventually, out of sheer will or the survival instinct that's so strong in humans. He used to think that once a body was broken it stays broken, and threatening to break it further would hardly rate a reaction.

The truth seems to be directly opposite of that. There isn't a part of him that hasn't been broken or cracked, torn, crushed, flayed. And the more he hurts, the more he wants to beg them not to hurt him again.

Even as the door opens, groaning on its rusting hinges, Len wants to sob. He wants to move away, to beg them to leave him alone. To pray to some moldy old diety he never much believed in, to offer his soul, his future, his every last breath, if He will just make this stop happening.

He wants to die.

He's ready for it, tired of living on the edge of it. But he doesn't have the strength anymore to act out and make them kill him.

Hell, he doesn't ever have the strength to sob, or to move away. He sure as hell doesn't have the strength to pray, though that sort of strength isn't physical.

He can hardly lift his head off the cold stone. He can hardly brace himself to watch the confrontation that's coming.

But he does.

He can tell Pavel is reaching his own tattered limits, because the door is entirely open and footsteps echo over the stone before the kid stirs. He's usually quicker than this, usually on his feet while the hinges are still groaning.

He watches Pavel rise, late and unsteady but rising all the same. Len allows his eyes to close, forcing himself to listen to the fight that's coming.

What he hears makes no sense.

"Chekov?"

The voice is strange. Tense, high with alarm, not the hoarse staccato of the aliens' ratty Standard. And none of these bastards ever bothered to learn the kid's name.

"Chekov...Jesus, what...?"

Familiar voice.

Len smirks to himself, prone against the cold stone. It makes his shattered cheekbone throb, but it's worth it. Since he's lost his damned mind he may as well face madness with a grin, right?

"_Prekratite uje, ostavte ego v pokoe_!" The kid stopped speaking English a few days ago, and he comes out with a shaking line of Russian, all guttural and sliding together as if he's speaking one long word. Whatever Russian's supposed to sound like normally, Len's pretty sure this ain't it.

Len's smirk fades. He hates this part.

"Chekov, it's...Jesus, somebody find Sulu. Or Spock. Somebody get..." That familiar voice pitched thin with tension suddenly cuts off with a choking sound. "Oh, Christ. Oh, Jesus. _Bones_?"

Len doesn't manage to stir, doesn't force his eyes open, but he does make a real attempt to focus. Only one person in the universe calls him Bones, and that one person sure as hell doesn't belong in this room. That person existed a lifetime ago. Not now, not here.

But then, this isn't the first time Len's heard Jim Kirk's voice. Not even the first time it's sounded real to him.

"Bones? God, are you-"

"_Nyet!_" Pavel, right on cue, his shadow falling over Len as he stands between him and the intruders.

Len squeezes his eyes more tightly closed, grasping onto that frail voice, hearing Pavel's breath rattling and the drag of his feet as he staggers to stay upright.

"Chekov. Pavel. _Fuck_, kid, stand down, let me check on-"

"_Nyet! Ne trogaite ego! Prekratite!_"

Len doesn't speak Russian - _nyet_ is the only thing the kid's said in the last few days that he recognizes at all. But the words Pavel says are words he says over and over again, and Len knows the sound of them. He could write them down, some bastardized phonetic version of them.

Prey-crah-tee-tyay.

Sometimes he thinks he might get them tattooed on his skin when he gets out of here. Mostly he realizes that's ridiculous: he's never getting out of here.

They're going to get impatient any minute now and force the kid out of their way. They're gonna come for Len. They always fucking come for Len, and he can't move himself away anymore. Can't argue, can't even lift his damned head and face them as they come.

"Captain, there's no...oh my _God_."

Shit. Double the pleasure. It's another familiar voice, another dusty sound rising from his rusted memory. And Jesus, Len almost wishes he had some strength back. He'd turn his head and lift his eyes and see if his brain loves him enough to give him visual hallucinations to go with the auditory ones.

"Pavel?"

This second voice is loud, too sudden, and there are quick footsteps against the rock floor. Len can feel the brush of them echo where his ear is pressed to the ground.

He opens his eyes the smallest crack and watches Pavel's pale, dirty feet recoiling backwards a single step before surging forward again.

"_Nyet_!" Pavel is shrill now. "_Ostavte ego v pokoe, _merzavci_!"_

Len's eyes shut again.

"Jesus. Pavel...Pasha! Pasha, it's me!"

"Back up, Sulu!"

"But he...Pasha, its-"

"Lieutenant! That's an order! Jesus, the kid's about to have a fucking heart attack, back away."

Fuck if this isn't convincing. When he hears Jim in his head he likes to hear Jim happy, not hoarse and strained like this.

He doesn't hear Sulu often, but he bets Pavel does.

"Captain."

Spock.

If there was a sound left in his throat, Len would've chuckled. Son of a bitch, his mind's fucked up today.

"Spock." The Kirk-hallucination sounds relieved. "Bones. He's...I can't even tell if he's a...alive." Jim Kirk never stutters. Hallucination's less convincing now. "We've got to get to him."

"Have you not-"

There's a quiet footstep, and Pavel gives a sudden, feral little growl. He's tiring, he's running out of words, that's what the growl means.

"Ah." Spock-hallucination sounds distantly surprised, and there's the rasp against stone of footsteps backing away. "Perhaps..."

"If I...if I stun him, can you catch him before he falls?"

"Jim, don't you fucking dare!" Sulu-hallucination, obviously feeling ballsy.

Len's eyes crack open, staring out at the blurred world.

Something isn't right here. Something isn't dream or reality.

His dreams would never talk about stunning Pavel, and in reality the aliens should be pounding into the kid by now.

With a painful but bracing breath, Len tilts his face from the cool stone underneath him and blinks out and up, past the stained pale blur that he knows is Pavel.

He can't see much. Colors. Command gold, science blue. Tan skin and pale. Gold hair and dark. Three distant shapes.

"Bones!" He hears Jim's voice, a cracked gasp of relief, as if the Jim-blur is actually real and has seen Len looking towards him.

Len's throat works, but he hasn't been able to swallow in days. He looks out at those blurs, and he understands.

There's no hallucination here.

It's time to go.

The blurs are real, but distant. Removed. Faceless, though they have identities now, and they are people he knows. They're still half-dream. The only thing that's not distant is the only thing he's had to hold on to for days. Weeks. However fucking long it's taken them to rot to this stage of rigor.

"Pavel." Len's voice is a joke, a dry rasp like the crinkle of thin paper on a med cot under the weight of a new patient. But he manages the sound.

Pavel turns instantly, his dirty feet moving in close until the pale bone of his knees block the blurs from Len's eyes.

Len looks up at him. He speaks carefully. "Gotta get up, kid."

Pavel's eyes are endless and still so fucking bright green, always the same shade of green even now that Len needs to see them to remember what green actually look like. He blinks those giant eyes at Len, but Len knows he hears him. He even understands, probably. The kid's a genius, after all, and his brain's too big to be atrophied beyond all reason.

He seems to get it, anyway, meeting Len's unsteady gaze with a growing fear in his eyes.

Len understands that fear. Leaving seems fucking terrifying.

"Pasha." Len's so hoarse that the words don't sound like much more than wheezing breaths. But Pavel will understand him. "Help me."

Len has to get up, and Pavel has to help. Len can't do it, not physically, not without Pavel. Pavel won't get it through his brain, won't understand all this, without Len's help.

...and if Len sees these familiar blurs and their hallucination-voices stunning Pavel with their fucking phasers until he falls limp and silent on the ground, he's pretty sure he won't ever fucking recover from that.

God knows how he's got the strength left, but the kid reaches out and takes Len's arm, careful not to touch anywhere near his wrist, or the hand Len can't look at. When Pavel tugs, Len lifts. But it's not enough – Pavel's strength is all adrenaline and psycho-soma, and Len's willpower isn't anything like enough to make his broken body move.

Pavel stops tugging, sinking onto his knees to the ground, staring at Len with the same fear in his eyes. He doesn't speak – Len's pretty sure he's completely forgotten Standard anyway – and he doesn't do more than flinch when careful, slow footsteps start in on them from the doorway.

He keeps his eyes on Pavel's. Whatever this is, he tries to say through his eyes, whatever it is it's something different. Different has to be good.

Whatever it is, they'll handle it together.

Pavel swallows, and whatever he manages to read on Len's face seems to get through to him. He nods, so small Len might be imagining it.

The footsteps approach.

In the end Pavel's fear snaps and he fights, surging off his knees and throwing himself backwards at the shadows that fall over them both. It's the Spock-blur who stops him, fingers on the kid's neck, lowering him as gently as Len would've put Joanna to bed years ago.

Len doesn't know much more than that, because the one blur that's all golden and bright and looming in over him reaches for his arm, and touches his fingers.

Len catches a pair of wide blue eyes jerking down to look at the misshapen lump of his hand, and sees that bright, golden face utterly crumpling in horror. Then the movement of his hand, the clench of Jim's shocked fingers, drives him up and away, blows him out of that room and somewhere up into the inky black high overhead.

* * *

It's a strange world, clean and bright and utterly alien, that surrounds Len when he opens his eyes.

Familiar, sure, but in some distant way. Familiar like Georgia is familiar. Like being happily married. It's a sepia-toned familiarity, old and yellowed and archaic. As if years have passed since he was last in these rooms.

Not just weeks.

Too bright, for one. The lights are dim, but the white walls and clean metal surfaces make everything gleam and reflect and shimmer, and it makes his eyes hurt.

Too new, too smooth and spotless. It seems false.

No footsteps, no distant thuds or shouts, no strangely-pronounced alien Standard. Too alone, without the smell and sound and warmth of Pavel. Without the strangled breathing as constant white-noise in his ears, or the hushed whisper or urgent murmur, the soft voice of Pavel in the beginning, or the broken Russian chokes of words at the end.

He's only been aware of his surroundings for a few moments, but he understands what's happening. He is where he told them he would end up. He's back on the ship. Back with his crew, his captain, his sickbay.

He always knew he would get back here. He never lost faith in Jim.

So why does it feel so false?

Jim is here. Sleeping, tucked in a chair so haphazardly that some old, rusty doctor in Len's brain can practically diagnose the strains and aches he'll suffer when he wakes up.

So fucking alien. Despite the fact that everything about him, the uniform, the tousled golden hair, the half-smirk on his exhausted face as he sleeps, is all exactly the way Len imagined it so often in the last few weeks.

Jim is just too smooth, too clean. Too polished and new, like some actor portraying A Person. And the room around them looked like stage scenery.

Len wants to be happy to be home. He wants to call out until Jim wakes up. He wants to see his best friend grinning in relief and making some joke about how bad Len looks. He wants to know it's over.

His throat works and his mouth stays shut.

He looks from Jim to the diagnosis panels over his head with bland disinterest. He knows what's wrong with him. They aren't subtle injuries. He's known all along, he just couldn't do anything about it.

Len doesn't lift his arms. He doesn't look at his hands. Not yet. He doesn't want to know.

He has never been a cloudy-headed idealist. He really hasn't. He's always known that life sucks and people can be bastards. He's always known that innocent people get hurt, and the good die young, and all that kind of realist bullshit.

But for all he's a cynical grouch on his best days, Len has always expected the best out of people. It's what made his arguments with Spock and Kirk so heated. It's what made him so vital to their friendship, and to the command of the ship.

He always hoped. Some-fucking-how, he always managed to hope.

Does the universe feel different just because that's gone?

Who the hell knows? Maybe he's just recovering. Hell, he hasn't even started recovering yet.

"Bones."

The voice is soft enough that Len doesn't register it for a moment. He blinks dry, scratched-feeling eyes and looks back at the chair beside the bed.

Jim smiles, bright and glowing and without the mix of cockiness and cynicism he can so often have. His eyes – blue, so fucking bright blue, and Len almost forgot what blue looked like – are glowing, but the skin under them is smudged dark as bruises. His exhaustion shows at the tight edges of his smile, and his worry comes through in his voice.

"Jesus Christ, this is even less fun than it is when our places are reversed."

Len smiles, a vague and automatic reaction, but he isn't sure if he wants to agree or argue so he doesn't say anything.

Jim leans in, those startling blue eyes scanning up and down all over Len's face, as if looking for something very specific and very minute. It's a strangely intense look for Jim.

Len wants to ask him about his hands, about how long it's been, how long they were missing, what happened to the bastards who had them. But when he opens his mouth only one word can possibly come out.

"Pavel."

Jim glances over his shoulder, nodding his chin back in that direction as if there isn't a curtain there blocking everything from Len's view.

Or blocking Len from everyone's eyes.

"He's woken up a couple of times – M'Benga's been pretty sedation-happy with you two, for different reasons. Hikaru's camped out at his bedside, though, so he won't wake up alone."

Jim gives a faint little laugh at that, a little roll of the eyes, as if Sulu's presence is just too sentimental to forgive.

Len is pretty damned sure that Jim's been camped at his bedside since they got to the ship.

"Bones..." Jim's little smirk fades and he abruptly looks like a man who's never smiled in his life. "Jesus."

Len is aware of his pulse moving through his hands, a sickening throb that makes him think he's pretty tightly bandaged. But he can't lift his arms yet, can't bring himself to look. He doesn't want to know what he's already sure of, but he braces himself to form the words, ask the question. Find out if his life really is over.

"Is he okay?" he asks instead, and the question doesn't surprise him.

"Chekov?" Jim shrugs, trying to grin again and failing. He finally slumps back in his chair and lets his exhaustion conquer his expression. "He will be, but it was dicey for a while. Same as you," he adds, shooting Len a look like he doesn't understand why Len isn't asking about himself.

Len just waits, expectant, wanting more.

Jim frowns. "M'Benga and Chapel spent hours on the two of you. Surprised the hell out of me when they said Chekov was in more danger, since he was the one up and moving and trying to fight us off back in that cell, and you were the one just...just laying there."

Len has a vague memory of it, of Pavel's voice and the blurred sight of command gold.

"Turns out Chekov was in more immediate danger, but you're in danger in more ways. In a hundred years or so when I can bring myself to go through them again, I'll let you read through the reports."

Len frowns, trying to focus his mind, to recall spotty memories beyond pain and fear and the stink of the cell. "What was...?"

"You want the short version? Another 12 hours and Chekov's body would've suffered damage we can't repair. Another 24 and he'd've been dead."

Len flinches weakly, but his eyes stay on Jim, needing to know. "How?"

"He was starving to death."

Len's throat works – it's not the answer he was expecting. It wasn't even on his top-five list. There was food. Nothing else to say about the place they were held or the bastards who held them, but there was always food in the cell.

Jim studies him as he talks. "Shocked us too. There was...in that cell, this pile of food. Rotting, mostly, and I don't know what the hell it even was, but it was edible. And you..." He smirks, and it's hollow. "Everything in the fucking world is wrong with you except for that. You've been fed."

Len can remember. When he was in with those bastards in their interrogation rooms long enough they'd bring him food – some fucked-up version of kindness – and when he got back to the cell Pavel always had leftovers to feed him.

He always curled up near Len, right up against him if Len wasn't hurting too bad, and fed him tiny bites pinched in his fingers, and spoke a lot of white noise that Len couldn't focus on but needed to hear.

Len's eyes shut and he can hear him, those increasingly uneven words, the hoarse, low voice, as if everything Pavel said was a secret he couldn't let their captors hear. Everything is private, meant for Len alone, and it's such a bizarre thing to take comfort in but Len grasps at these secret words he alone will ever hear.

He can feel the food pressed against his mouth by Pavel's shivering fingers, can taste the strange flavors, the copper of blood dripping into his mouth, the grit of the unavoidable dirt between his teeth as he chews.

"Bones..." Jim's voice is distant again, like a hallucination. Like it was before. "Don't you want to know about yourself? I can tell you..."

Len doesn't answer – he never answers back when Pavel talks, when he curls in and feeds him so carefully and talks endlessly to take Len's mind away from the other voices; the alien words and sharp tones and the echoes of his own screams.

His throat is burning, but he doesn't ask Pasha for water. He'll get it soon enough, Pavel seems to read him so well these days.

"Bones?" Distant voice, but there's movement nearby, the groan of a chair. And a touch, heavy and too-firm, lands on Len's arm.

Pavel doesn't touch him on his arms. Not now, not after they destroyed his hands. The only ones who do are them, the aliens. The bastards looking for another way to hurt him.

Len doesn't open his eyes, doesn't even want to see what they're about to do to him. Why they're gripping his arm, holding him tight, making distant human-shaped sounds too near to him.

He whimpers, hearing and hating the tight weak sound of it. He has sobbed for them, screamed, begged. He has forgotten pride and strength with these bastards. He has lost everything he had left, and he can't bring himself to care anymore.

"Please," he says, groans, without pride but without self-consciousness enough to care. "Please. No."

The too-close voice says something, and repeats it louder, more alarmed. Closer.

Len flinches away, feeling the bastard's grip around his arm and knowing they're going after his hands again. "No!" he gets out, strangled but louder, as if that ever helps. "Jesus, no, stop it!"

The grip leaves his arm, but he knows better than to think it's over. He keeps his eyes tightly shut, braced for the blows, the burns, the cracking or squeezing or twisting that is going to come, God, it always comes.

But then...

"No!"

This voice isn't distant. This is the only voice that makes sense to him anymore.

"Get away from him!"

Pavel. Pavel will fight them off, at least for a little while. Pavel will watch over him, will keep him off the ground, will feed him and talk to fill the silence that chokes Len's mind, and tear his own uniform to strips to help bandage Len's body as best he can.

Len turns his head towards the voice and forces his reluctant eyes to open, and there's Pavel. Cleaner than Len remembers, but gaunt and pale and huge-eyed, tense and ready to fight, standing between Len and the intruders who have come for him.

"Don't touch him," Pavel hisses, and when did he start speaking Standard again? "Get back!"

"Pasha, what-"

Pavel ignores the distant voice and turns to Len. The desperation in his eyes tells Len he feels too weak to do any good.

Len doesn't mind.

Sometimes he does, sometimes he's furious to see weakness in Pavel. Sometimes he wants to scream his rage that Pavel has been left alone for so long but still can't fight. But there's a calm in him, in his subconscious mind, that lets him meet the kid's eyes and nod acceptance.

Pavel comes to his side (to his bedside, but there isn't a bed in their cell, what the hell-) and meets his eyes for a painful moment before turning his back to stay between Len and any threat.

When Len looks past him he recognizes the sickbay beyond. He recognizes Jim Kirk's horrified face, and Hikaru Sulu beside him. He remembers rescue, remembers talking to Jim, but it's all so fucking distant that he can't focus on it. He can't grab it and hold it.

Pavel, his pale back bared in the sickbay gown he's wearing, his hands clenched into fists, that is all Len can grasp. Even when he sees the round knobs of bones down that thin back, and sees the bones of the kid's wrists as he clenches his hands, he remembers words about starving and danger and death but he can't seem to connect to them.

"What do we...shit, call Chapel. We might need..."

Anything Len's mind remembers as spoken in Jim's voice seems like long-ago fantasy. Even when he hears, right at this moment, Jim's pinched voice:

"Christ. How the fuck did this happen?"

Even then it seems like a memory his mind is looping for him, like he's telling Pavel the old story about how Jim once said those words long ago. And like other memories of Jim that he's told Pavel about to fill the long hours, this one echoes through his mind and makes him think, remember.

Makes him wonder: how the fuck did this ever happen?


	2. Chapter 2

"How about we let the kid go?"

Pavel doesn't turn, doesn't beam or beg or nod his enthusiastic agreement, though those are exactly the things he most wants to do. He stays calm, fingers still tapping out a course adjustment on the panel in front of him.

"What do you think, Spock?" Captain Kirk isn't a man with much use for subtlety, and he so obviously wants Pavel to hear him that he's all but shouting across the bridge. "You think Chekov's up for an away mission?"

Pavel doesn't-grin even harder, because he and Spock have worked on many projects together in the nine months since they set out on this five year assignment, and he is sure that he's proven his competence to Spock by now.

He hears Hikaru's throat clearing, soft and casual, and he manages to not-blush along with his not-grin when he glances over.

Hikaru smirks in that gentle way of his that tells Pavel the smirk is mask, and Hikaru's rooting for him. That might just be because Hikaru is tired of hearing Pavel complain about not being chosen for a single planet-side mission.

Still, Pavel takes what he can get.

"-and given the research-oriented focus of this particular assignment, I believe the ensign would be a fitting choice to accompany Doctor McCoy."

"Mmm. Very logical reasoning, Spock. How boring from you."

Chekov doesn't move, hands still skating across the panel, but his eyes rise slowly and focus on nothing as Captain Kirk's footsteps bring him right up to Pavel. He waits, nerves twisting in his gut, confidence and excitement making his face heat even before Kirk's hand lands on his shoulder.

"Okay, little man, moment of truth."

Pavel turns then, feels the smile blasting off his face as he looks up at his captain. "Sir?" he asks, the fake innocence entirely wasted.

Hikaru muffles a laugh.

Kirk doesn't bother muffling his. "Man, I'm glad I get to enjoy this moment, because in a few months you'll just groan and bitch like the rest of these lazy bastards when I send them planetside." His smile schools itself a little. "Let's be serious for a split second here, kid. You're the big one-eight now, you're clear to go as far as Starfleet's concerned, but this one's a weird mission for you to pop your cherry on."

Hikaru is outright snickering by then.

Pavel sends him an irritated look that might have been haughty if he'd been able to get rid of his own smile. "I understand the details of the mission, sir."

"I'm not questioning that, kid. I bet you've got the whole history of the planet memorized already."

Pavel blinks, trying for innocent again. "First contact was only months ago, sir. What little we know about the whole history of this planet is very easy to memorize."

Kirk rolls his eyes. "No wonder Spock talks you up. You're like a mini-him. A Vulcanlet. Okay, boy genius, you've got the job."

Pavel beams. "Thank you, sir! I will not let you down."

More than just Hikaru are muffling their grins and giggles in response, but Pavel hardly cares. It's more popular on Kirk's bridge to be casual and cool about everything, to meet Kirk's sarcasm and nicknames with like kind. But Pavel has never been afraid of being the earnest geek in a room full of popular kids. That's been his entire life, after all.

He used to dislike the informality of Jim Kirk's bridge on a typical shift. He has always been unsure when it comes to the social aspects of people, the camaraderie and teasing. He hasn't had enough experience with that sort of thing to be comfortable with it. There are lines and limitations to teasing, to rolling his eyes at his captain and not being punished for it. Pavel has never been sure of where those lines are.

But he i_is/i _eighteen now, and he's been on this bridge for almost a year. He still isn't always sure of himself, but he is sure of his position enough to know that if he does step out of line, he won't be immediately stripped of his rank and sent back to year one at the Academy like others his age.

He realizes that when Jim Kirk uses phrases like Vulcanlet, that means it's probably safe for Pavel to answer freely. If he were Hikaru he would call Kirk 'Jim' and tell him to go to hell, and then say thank-you in the very next breath.

Pavel isn't nearly as comfortable with the captain as Hikaru, of course. When Kirk grins his amusement and pats Pavel's hair like Pavel is a small child wanting papa's validation, Pavel just accepts it and turns, beaming at his panel.

"You gotta train that enthusiasm out of him if you really want your own Mini-Vulcan around, Spock," Kirk says, moving back up to his chair in the middle of the bridge.

Spock's sigh is audible – not emotion-based, of course, but a long-suffering sort of sigh. "Captain, I find it hard to-"

"Oh, but wait! Don't turn him into you until after the mission. Half the fun of this assignment is going to be telling Bones he's gotta camp out planetside for two weeks with a hyperactive teenager."

Pavel's breath sticks in his throat.

His stomach curls instantly, and everything he hasn't thought about regarding this mission suddenly comes screaming into his head.

Hikaru's laughter quiets, though no one's paying to the helm any attention anymore.

Pavel ignores Hikaru's silence, feeling his face heating red and his smile fading at the corners. He looks down at his panel, makes a course correction that will make absolutely no difference.

Kirk is talking about other things, teasing Spock again about something, by the time Pavel looks over at his best friend.

Hikaru smiles at him, small and wry. He nods his head back towards Kirk and rolls his eyes.

Pavel returns the smile, only a little wilted.

If being young and over-eager and incapable of playing it cool hasn't dented Pavel's will or his ambition to succeed in Starfleet, then his absurd reactions toward Leonard McCoy aren't going to either.

* * *

"-this is how I first developed the model that would disprove Conway and Kochen's free will theorem. It was quite a stir at the Conservatory when I wrote the paper. In fact, one of my professors, Romanov, this self-important _child_, threatened to walk out if they passed me. Of course they did. And Romanov..."

He clears his throat, only aggravating the burn as he talks.

Everyone has left them to the silence of sickbay. Kirk and Hikaru have gone for the first time since Pavel and Len were recovered.

No one knows what to do with them. It's still new, this thing, this being rescued and back where they belong, but Pavel knows that already people are scared of them. Even Kirk, even Hikaru. They are scared of what they've gone through and scared to find out what they've become as a result.

Absurd, since they aren't back yet. They aren't recovered. There is no result here. The cause hasn't yet ended, and so the result can't begin to be measured.

He doesn't have to think about recovery, so he is free to go on as he's gone for weeks. Talking, staying close.

"I have no idea what became of Romanov," he says. "I don't think he left, though."

Len is sleeping, so of course he doesn't respond. Pavel doesn't talk for response. He tells aimless stories and sings childish songs and fills the silence for just that reason: to fill the silence.

He curls up on the bunk beside Len, supporting him as he sleeps. He is supposed to be resting in some other bed, in some other room, but that's impossible.

He has to be with Len, or else nothing at all in this strange new reality will seem real.

There is a soft bed here, not the cold stone ground, but Pavel knows that Len is still mostly in that cell. Pavel is, surely Len must be.

He knows it, and that's such a strange thing. To be so certain of the now, the ship and the rescue and the reactions they are causing, but to i_know/i_ as certain as he has ever known anything that he and Len are still trapped, still prisoners.

He feels like he exists both places at once, and the only thing he has in both places is Len.

"I'll tell you about the theory behind the paper. The theorem I was disproving states, to put it simply, that if we live in a universe that isn't determinist, if free will exists, than certain elementary particles must exercise that free will..."

He goes on.

Physics, star charts, mathematics, the reason he has always hated the color red. He never talks with an aim in mind. He just can't run out of things to say, or else he has failed.

The lights have lowered to the artificial dimness of third-shift when a nurse comes near them and tries to push her way into their world.

Pavel doesn't know her, this red-haired night nurse. Len will, but he's asleep and Pavel's job is to let him rest, not bother him.

She looks at them in distant surprise – like someone warned her, warned the night shift, warned the whole crew, but she didn't believe them – and looks over Len's head at the diagnostic panels.

Pavel watches her, unhappy, even as his fingers stroke through Len's hair and his low murmurs continue without pause. He does switch to Russian – Len doesn't ever mind, and this woman doesn't need to hear his nonsense words. They're not for her.

The nurse meets his eyes and looks away fast, uncomfortable. No bedside manner, Len wouldn't like her.

She moves closer, and his gaze sharpens on her as she pulls his own diagnostic off the side of the bed – they rigged his vitals into the same bed when he refused to move and they didn't have the heart to force him.

She frowns at whatever she sees, and steps in to examine the tube attached to Pavel's arm.

Archaic, the IV stand. Pavel had no idea they're still used in today's medical practices, but apparently there's no hypo of drugs that can fuse a month's worth of food into Pavel's body.

He doesn't care. He likes the archaic IV because Len finds that old-fashioned sort of medicine to be so useful. He doesn't mind the burn in his arm, or the way he's forced to be still to keep it in where it belongs. It means he is stuck where he is, and he doesn't want to be anywhere else.

The nurse frowns at his arm and the IV.

"Ensign Chekov," she says, her voice a soft murmur.

Pavel fixes a glower on her, but Len doesn't stir at her voice so he doesn't stop his quiet words to Len long enough to answer her.

She meets his eyes, and seems disturbed. But she brushes it off and sets her expression.

"Ensign, you've got to get back to your own bed. Your body needs to rest, and you can't..."

Without quieting his Russian monologue – he's reciting old bits of songs his mother used to sing him now – Pavel looks at the woman.

He doesn't intend to leave, of course, but he pulls his hand from Len's hair and slips to the edge of the bed, away from Len, as if he's going to obey her.

Len's calm sleep disintegrates. His brow furrows, his mouth moves, his breathing is uneven. The monitor over his head...Pavel can't see it, but he knows Len's heart must be speeding up.

It's difficult, like trying to halt an involuntary reflex, but Pavel lets his words dry up when he comes to the end of a verse, and he clamps his lips together. Silence falls.

Len mutters in his sleep, twitching, curling onto his side and almost reaching out in his sleep. As if chasing something. His breath is audible, his wordless murmurs sharp with distress.

Pavel glares at the nurse – this is her fault – and calls his own bluff. He slides back in, keeping his one arm still and bringing the other around Len's head to twist fingers through his hair again. He goes right into the last verse of the song he'd stopped on, and his eyes dare the nurse to speak again.

Len murmurs and falls silent. His brow smooths, his body falls into stillness again.

Pavel has caused him pain. Len is asleep, yes, but that's no excuse. He will make amends for it when Len wakes up – that is a solid vow to himself, as grim as any promise ever made.

The lullaby he sings reaches its ending, and he doesn't even pause before finding himself humming the tune of an absolutely horrible American pop song that was blasting all over campus his first year at the Academy. He only knows some of the words, but he hums around the rest, and Len never cares either way.

Len sleeps.

When Pavel can make himself look up from Len's dark hair and bruised skin, the nurse is gone.

* * *

The written language of these aliens is something the computers are still working to tear apart, to turn into phonetic standard and so begin the long process of twisting these beings into seeming like every other bland humanoid species the Federation has ever come across.

Len does some reading up on the basics while the Enterprise careens through space towards their planet. Most of his research needs to be physiology, but of course that's what they have the sparsest data on. So he reads up on what he can.

They've got half a dozen sounds that aren't particularly translatable to human mouths, which just figures. The closest thing to their name, their planet and their race, was written by the first contact team as _Maalox_.

It wasn't a fond sort of humor that accompanied that decision, but despite unflattering old Earth references, Starfleet seems to have accepted the name.

The first contact team wasn't overly impressed with the species. They didn't warn the Federation away, but the final recommendation was not to offer Federation membership.

Of course the bureaucrats back on Earth won't let first impressions be the final word, not until they're sure there's nothing to be gained by having access to this planet and its people. But the matter was almost settled for them: some genius on the away team for the first contact brought some damned virus with them – some remnants of a cold, a flu, some innocuous thing they were recovering from or just coming down with.

Human beings never fucking learn.

Now there's a disease ravaging this unfriendly but innocent planet full of beings. They are dying from this thing they have no immunity against. It's the fault of Starfleet, the Federation, and they're desperate for a cure they can translate to their physiology, fast.

It's Jim who recommended Len. Say what he will about Jim, Len knows he's got a loud loyal streak in him that makes his doctor the best doctor in the universe, just like his engineer and his pilot and his third-shift admin clerk.

Len doesn't argue the assignment, though. He does have a knack for physiology, a talent for finding links in completely disparate species. He's quicker than a lot of the self-important diagnosticians filling the medical journals with bullshit.

He can do this.

But first there's the journey, the frustratingly limited research.

Their spoken language is terse and staccato – Len sits for a few minutes and listens to some recordings made of the first contact – and it's strangely unsettling. Uhura is fascinated, of course, and Len leaves her to tear through the other recordings.

He's thinking bemused thoughts about Uhura, about how this whole damned crew is so obsessive about their particular interests, when he runs into The Kid in the corridor outside sickbay.

Almost literally runs into the kid, since the kid is fucking running like some maniac's chasing him.

"Doctor!" The kid is nothing but elbows and eyeballs as he wheels to an awkward stop. He's in these ridiculous little shorts, face flushed, curls sweaty and wilted over his forehead.

McCoy smirks, pretending he doesn't find this kid unnerving in like ten different ways. "The hell are you doing jogging around at this hour, Ensign?"

Chekov's healthy flush gets darker, but he smiles in that earnest-squirrel way of his, and Len feels disconcertingly like he's stepped out the door of a dark bar after a bender and is squinting gritty, drunk eyes at an unexpected sunrise.

"If I run before my shift I seem to get right into the paths of a dozen crewmen in search of coffee, and they assure me that they're much more genial after the caffeine, so..." He shrugs, pert and healthy and a fucking _kid_. "I run after my shift instead, and when I get between crewmen and their beds they are at least too tired to protest."

Len flashes a smile despite himself. "You could just use the equipment in the rec rooms like a sane person."

Chekov grins back. "I prefer to be eccentric. Of all the reputations I've gained so far in my life, it is the most fun to live up to."

Len almost chuckles – hell, the kid's got himself a sense of humor. Who knew?

And why's it coming out now? They've been serving together almost a year, Len hasn't ever heard the kid talk this much, except when he invades the bridge to police Jim and his reckless little crew.

He figures it out pretty fast – he can still see Jim's smirk and hear his obnoxiously gleeful 'but guess _who_ you're going with?' - and it makes his smile twist a little, wry.

"Looking forward to your first taste of planetside work, kid?"

Chekov can't contain his reaction. He all but beams, glowing under his sweat-dampened flush. "Very much, doctor! I am pleased that the captain has such faith in me."

_Sewenteen_, Len says to himself, instant and instinctive, the way he has to at least once a week. _He's fucking sewenteen. _And his mind says it with that chirpy little voice and that accent that Chekov so proudly announced it in once, ages ago, on their very first mission.

But for fuck's sake. It would take a way more damaged guy than Len McCoy to not respond to that bright, happy-to-please voice and the shadowless grin, and Jesus _fuck _the kid needs some running shorts that cover a little bit more of those fucking mile-long runner legs of his, and...

He clears his throat fast, biting his smile off at the edges. "Just make sure you're ready. Jim's giving us a week down there on our own before he comes checking up, and I want the whole damned planet inoculated and rosy-cheeked by then."

The kid's expression tames a little, but none of his glow fades. "I'll be ready. I have no medical experience, of course, but I took several advanced courses in chemistry, and a rather interesting biomedical engineering elective for fun one term, and I've been working out how to bend that experience to best assist you in your work."

There's a pause, as if the kid is waiting for a pat and a cookie. Len can barely resist groaning.

He brushed Jim off when he teased him over days being trapped with such a perky little guy, but God knows if he'll be able to tolerate such intense need for validation without smacking the kid like a bad puppy.

He doesn't particularly want to be a shit, but he has the unpleasant feeling that he's going to dampen the kid's enthusiasm more than once by the time they get to come back home to the ship.

On the bright side...the more annoyance he can muster towards the kid, the less times he'll have to blast the word _sewenteen_ through his brain to calm his perverted-old-man mind from wandering too far in the wrong direction.

* * *

He wakes up with the familiar grip of thin fingers in his hair, and Len lets out a breath before opening his eye. One more day.

But it's sickbay greeting him when he forces his eyelids up, and his mind makes the connection a little faster this time than last time.

He turns his head and grimaces at the uncomfortable-looking way Pavel has jammed himself into the bed beside him. He takes in the IV still attached to the kid, the exhaustion painting dark circles under Pavel's eyes, and he sighs.

He should wake Pavel up and send him to his own bed. He's surprised that M'Benga and Christine have even allowed this.

Then again, he also knows what kind of fight Pavel can put up when someone tries to separate him from Len, and if the kid's mind is as slow as Len's to accept that they're out of their cage...

He doesn't move, and doesn't attempt to wake Pavel. He wants to reach out and touch him, to smooth his fingertips over that too-sharp cheekbone and trace the edges of a fading bruise, but when he reaches out the white of the bandages over his numb hands catches his eye and stalls his arm.

"Morning."

The voice almost makes him jump. He jerks his hand down, out of his view, and blinks out at the room beyond.

Jim's smile is thin, his mask a little weaker than normal. He stands there in uniform, arms folded over his chest, and despite the Captain pose he seems a little unsure.

Len can remember talking to him for a little while before, and he wonders what kind of screaming mess he dissolved into between then and now.

He smiles, as brittle as Jim's but not insincere. "Hey, Jim."

Jim lets out a breath and his arms uncross and drop to his sides. He moves in close to the bed, gaze flickering to Pavel for a moment before he moves around to Len's other side and sits on the edge of the cot.

Len thinks about telling him that the damned thin med cots aren't designed for three separate bodies, but he sees the exhaustion and worry behind Jim's eyes and the words don't come.

"How you feeling?" Jim asks, quiet.

Len hums instead of shrugging, not wanting to disturb Pavel. "A little bit more present, anyway," he mutters in answer. There's not much else he can say. His body is numb and heavy, his mind is spotty, and there aren't a lot of words for how he's feeling beyond that.

"That's a start," Jim says with a slightly more sincere smile. "I probably don't have to tell you that we're-"

"What happened back on that planet?"

Jim stills, his words cutting off. He clears his throat quietly. "What...which part?"

"To the bastards who had us."

"We killed most of them," Jim answers, matter-of-fact, his eyes suddenly harder than they were. "The ones in that detention center we pulled you out of. They worked for the government, the Empress that just died, so it's become this diplomatic shitstorm, even worse than it was when they were just sick and dying."

Len regards him with blank eyes. "The Empress is dead?"

"A few days ago," Jim confirms with a nod. "The day after we got you back."

McCoy thinks about that, his gaze leaving Jim and moving to the side. Towards Pavel, but not all the way to him. He smiles, and it feels brutal and cold.

"Good."

Jim winces so hard that Len catches it in his peripherals. But he doesn't pay it any mind. Yeah, it's not his typical response to death.

But he's not insincere.

"How long?" he asks.

"Three weeks," Jim says after a moment. "A month on the planet, three weeks since you last contacted the ship."

Len stares at him. The words almost seem to tunnel, to go distant in that way he's been fighting since he woke up here. But not because he suddenly thinks he's back there. Just because the words don't make any fucking sense.

"Three weeks," he repeats.

Jim nods.

"It felt like..." Len wants to scrub the shock out of his eyes, but his hands may as well not exist. He wants to laugh, but he's not sure he remembers how. "I'd've believed three years before three weeks."

"It was a fucking lifetime," Jim says, his voice suddenly sharp. "I don't care if it was three hours, it was too long. I shouldn't have sent you-"

"Jim."

"I shouldn't have." Jim reaches out as if to touch his arm, but hesitates. His hand twitches back. "I should have known better than to trust you to some planet we hardly know anything about." He looks past Len at Pavel. "Sure as hell shouldn't have sent him. Jesus, Bones, his first away mission. He's a fucking_ kid_. And you..."

Len swallows, looking away from Jim's guilt and over at Pasha's slack face instead.

"Hikaru is so pissed off at me over it. Every single day...and not just him. Jesus, the whole ship seems to have some fetish for Russian jailbait. Even _Spock_, Christ, in his own way, you know. 'In hindsight it was perhaps inadvisable to allow the ensign a place on the away team'. Which coming from him is like a screaming tantrum from anyone else. Even the fucking Vulcan."

Len doesn't want to answer, doesn't want to think about it, because all it will do is make him wonder how the last month would have gone without Pavel there. And that way lies madness.

"You're going to have a lot of people coming by to thank you," Jim goes on, obviously trying to pitch his voice to be more cheerful. "For keeping the kid alive despite my bad judgment."

Len wants to laugh, but the sound that grounds out of his throat isn't very amused. "You got that wrong, at least."

Jim hesitates. "What?"

"I didn't keep him alive."

Len's eyes are stuck on Pavel's pale skin. Maybe the kid is thin, maybe dangerously starved, but Len can't remember ever seeing him looking different than this. He's always had these sunken eyes and cheekbones that look like they're a deep breath away from carving out of his skin.

Most important, he's always been right here. Always with his fingers in Len's hair, always breathing in his ear, murmuring in sleep and talking while awake. Always talking. And Len has always listened. He's always known about the kid's family, about a stunted childhood spent in the libraries and universities of Russia, and his hopes and fears in going to the Conservatory, and signing up for Starfleet.

He's always known this kid inside and out. And the kid has always known him. Always been here for him.

"It was the other way around," he says finally, letting himself turn back to Jim.

Jim searches his face, grim and nervous.

Len meets those vibrant blue eyes set in that carelessly attractive face, flush with health and pale with worry, and he can't reconcile the memories he has of Jim with this lifetime of knowing Pavel that he's convinced he's had.

Maybe he's not as close to being incoherent as he was when he first woke up here, but he's still not much closer to sanity.

* * *

Pavel isn't sure that Doctor McCoy senses it, but there's something strange about this planet. Something off-putting about this place that they've been housed in, and the strangely-accented, grim men who seem to come and go, but never all at once. Never so their human guests are alone.

They aren't doctors, these men. At least they take no interest in Doctor McCoy's work. They watch and listen to everything, but react to nothing. McCoy pays them no attention, but Pavel can't help but wonder.

He has come to believe they are guards of some kind, but with that revelation comes the disconcerting fact that he has no idea if they are protecting the Starfleet officers or trapping them.

Lieutenant Desmarais wonders as well.

He is security, the lieutenant, a soft-spoken man with a musical sort of accent, not much like most of the overbearing giants in Security. He is the third and final member of the away team, sent with them because Captain Kirk refused to send them to even this non-combatant planet without some measure of protection.

Pavel doesn't mind - he likes Desmarais. Desmarais seems to like him as well, which is rare in someone he hardly knows.

"You pronounce my name correctly," Desmarais told him at the beginning, at the nervous last minutes before they climbed on the transporter padd to appear on this planet. "There is much to be said for that."

Pavel just smiled. "My grandmother was French. I have never seen her outside of Russia but she tried to teach me some of the language growing up."

They bonded some over the fact that Desmarais has the misfortune of being named Rene and being surrounded by mostly American, machismo-crammed security officers who think that a man named Rene is simply hilarious. Pavel tells him about his own familiar name, Pasha, getting out to some of the cadets during his few months at the Academy.

They bonded further when Nyota came around to pass out the translators she rigged. Quick and crude, she said about her own programming job, but Pavel knows Nyota and her talents.

It was McCoy who shot the two other members of his landing team a look and asked Nyota if the translators were good enough to understand a couple of heavy accents.

Pavel smiled at the doctor as innocently as he could, and replied, "You tink I hef eccent? Wery strange."

Desmarais shook his head solemnly. "I seenk zee doctor ees hearing sings. We speak zee, how you say, bootiful Engleesh."

And of course it hadn't gotten more than a glare from McCoy, but Nyota laughed.

Needless to say, of the many officers Pavel has met he doesn't get along with most of them. But he rather likes Desmarais.

"Is this what you expected?" Pavel asks him the second night, after they have left the lab and gone to the oversized quarters they share, and the silent aliens who have been their constant guardians are safely shut away behind a closed door.

Rene seems to understand him instantly, and he seems unsettled as he looks out at that closed door. "I didn't expect anything," he says in answer. "But it isn't particularly comforting."

Pavel hesitates but turns to the doctor. "What about you, sir?"

"What?" McCoy asks, distracted as he often seems to be, flipping through an unreadable book given to them by the Speaker for the Empress, who seems to be the only diplomatic contact they'll have. The book contains images, charts, of Maalox physiology.

Pavel almost regrets interrupting the doctor's study.

"Is this what you expected?" he repeats himself dutifully. "All this," he continues awkwardly when McCoy doesn't look up from the book. "I suppose I thought we would have more contact with the people here."

"Hmm?" McCoy looks over at him and Rene, seeming to comprehend his words after a delay. "What, you wanted to play wandering healer to the ailing people?"

Pavel ignores his smirk with some difficulty, willing his face not to turn red. "That isn't what I mean. I mean...patients, at least. What they are doing, keeping us indoors here and bringing you samples of blood, of skin..."

Rene nods with his small but constant frown. "The only infected people you have been allowed to see have been corpses. It seems that if they truly wanted a cure quickly they would give you more."

McCoy's smirk fades and he hums. "It's sure as hell not ideal. And no, honestly, this set-up isn't what I was expecting. I don't know if they're hiding us from the rest of the planet, or hiding the planet from us. Either way it's not how I want to work something like this." He looks back at the book. "Then again, it's not the worst circumstances either. We knew these people weren't exactly warm to Starfleet, since the last pack of uniformed monkeys who showed up here brought this disease with them."

"But they do themselves no good limiting our exposure," Pavel says, looking around the quarters. It is no replacement for the lab they spend their days in, but he and McCoy have filled it with texts, with charts of their own making, with the equipment brought from the ship.

And that's strange, and unsettling: except for that book McCoy is reading, everything they have to help them was brought by they themselves. The Maalox have been no help.

He sighs, knowing it's useless to talk about it. "We should be treating people, not samples."

McCoy meets his eyes for a moment, eyebrows raised, amusement barely hidden under his expression. "Spoken like a true doctor. Sure you don't want to switch fields?"

Pavel smiles instantly, and it's ridiculous to do so but he realizes what sort of compliment that is coming from a healer like McCoy.

"I couldn't," he says, only half joking. "I already know that I would never have your talent, and if I'm not to be the best at something..."

"Why bother trying? Christ Jesus, kid, how did we fit on board the Enterprise with your ego taking up half the ship?"

Pavel sees him rolling his eyes and looking back at his book, but he isn't bothered. McCoy thinks Pavel would be a good doctor. There is no snort or contempt that can take that from him.

Rene pats him on the shoulder as he leaves them, wandering around to do one of his regular checks out the narrow windows into the dark landscape beyond.

Pavel watches him go, but turns back to McCoy. "I'm not egocentric, doctor – though if I were I'm young enough to get away with it."

McCoy scoffs, not looking up from the charts on the heavy pages of the book. "Nobody wants as much validation as you do without having a massive ego to feed."

"Validation?" Pavel smiles to himself, taking one of the padds they have already filled with ideas and possible tests, scanning down the screen absently. "You think that I want you to tell me that I'm a genius?"

"You saying you _don't_ want me to tell you you're a genius?"

Pavel grins at the padd, picks up a stylus and makes a quick change to an absently-jotted formula he had written earlier seemingly apropos of nothing. "As little as I want you to reassure me that I'm Russian."

McCoy snorts.

"Honestly, doctor, I know what I am. I have never looked to someone else for recognition or appreciation."

McCoy looks up again, and he isn't a man subtle about his doubts. They show all over his face.

Pavel regards the padd. "I am a genius," he says, "because 'genius' is a human term with defined parameters that I fit into. That is decided, it needs no validation."

"Oh, come on." McCoy straightens, eying Pavel like he's another sample, another alien version of a thing that McCoy feels he should recognize. "Kids like you are always..." He hesitates, mouth creasing.

Pavel raises his eyebrows and waits.

Hikaru thinks that because Pavel has an overdeveloped interest in Doctor McCoy that Pavel will spend his time on this planet following him around in addled adoration. He said as much to Pavel before they left the ship, gave him a well-meaning warning about taking the bad-tempered doctor too seriously.

But Pavel isn't without his opinions, and he's never been scared to voice them. If he does have something as banal as a 'crush' on McCoy, it isn't enough to change who he is.

So he regards the doctor with steady, amused eyes. "Yes? Kids like me? What are we always doing?"

McCoy rolls his eyes. "Want me to go on? Fine. I knew kids like you all through med school, during my residency. The gifted, the genius, the ones who were younger or tested better or learned faster. And every one of them talked like they were hot shit, but every one of them was constantly coming to us lesser mortals and making sure we knew every single thing they did that was better than us. Nothing they did mattered on its own merit, it mattered when they could lord it over us. And that kind of ego ain't nothing but fear in disguise."

Pavel moves to the other side of the table that McCoy has his books spread out on. He sits on a narrow-framed, hard chair and sets the padd down, careful not to disrupt the piles of work around them.

He feels McCoy's eyes on him, knows the doctor is waiting for him to get angry or offended or protest his comparison to some oafish braggarts in med school.

Truthfully, he does want to protest it.

He is used to being judged and disliked just for what he is, for the circumstances surrounding his unlikely position in the universe. But Leonard McCoy – and Pavel can't help but to hear Hikaru sighing his name, McCoooy, in that way he does when he's trying to tease Pavel into confessing his grand love – isn't everyone else.

Pavel doesn't know if he admires the doctor, if he has some attraction, or if it's something else that draws him to the man. But he knows that the idea of McCoy regarding him the same way so many other people have doesn't sit right.

The doctor isn't like anyone Pavel has ever known. He is sharp, yes, a bundle of pointed edges under his surprisingly thin skin, but at the same time he is the very opposite of dangerous. Pavel watches him often, on the bridge talking to the captain, and it's such a striking thing.

He speaks tersely, he is honest beyond politeness, he relies on sarcasm and disbelief. But the words he says in such a sharp voice, those words are all about healing, about goodness and morality, right and wrong. The jagged edges are in his tone, not in the words themselves.

To Pavel there is something familiar about the conflict surrounding McCoy. The goodness and the sharp edges. Like a man who has so much to say that he can't help but stutter. McCoy...he has such open, utter faith in the world, in people, that he feels like he can't show it or he'll make himself too vulnerable.

McCoy will argue with Kirk and Spock, heatedly, about how they ought to do a thing because it's the right thing to do. And McCoy believes it, that the right thing should always be done, just on the basis of it being the Right Thing to do. But McCoy has lived too long and seen too much, no doubt, to really believe that anyone does the right thing for its own sake.

McCoy sees his own goodness as a weakness. That is the conclusion Pavel has come to in his months of studying the man. McCoy knows that the universe is cold and empty, that people are self-centered creatures interested in the continuance and betterment of their own lives and not much beyond that.

His heart is open to the world like a gaping wound, and instead of covering it with bandages he hides it inside a suit of armor, behind a barbed wire fence.

What amazes Pavel the most is that McCoy doesn't ever stop his fight for what's right. The barbed wire, the sarcasm, they are what he retreats behind, but he never stays hidden for long.

Pavel is a genius, but unlike most young geniuses he has as good a grasp on people as he does on theory and science. Pavel has been able to read most of the people he's ever met within moments. But Leonard McCoy is a constant wonder to him.

Hikaru calls it a crush. Pavel thinks it is something deeper.

So he doesn't jump on the doctor with protests about being compared to whatever immature self-centered cretins he knew in medical school. He simply realizes that he must show McCoy that what's true for some isn't true for all. He must get McCoy out from behind the barbed wire.

"Doctor," he says finally, his eyes on the padd in front of him because he is bad at speaking when it matters to him, "I wanted so badly to be chosen for this assignment because the challenge is fascinating to me. When a cure is found and this planet is saved, no one will credit me with the victory. This is your mission. I am one more tool at your disposal. No one will honor the doctor's assistant. If I wanted fame or compliments or validation, I wouldn't be here."

He hesitates, looking up and across the table. His cheeks heat when he sees McCoy regarding him with genuine curiosity on his face.

He wants to be interesting to this man.

He clears his throat, feeling oddly nervous. "But when they give the credit to you, where it will belong, I will know that I did help. That some of the work was mine, and that my presence was an aid. I will know it, and that will satisfy me. I've got a list of credits pages long that won't mean as much." He smiles, unsure. "Also _you_ will know, and that will satisfy me even more."

McCoy's eyebrows lift in silent question.

Pavel thinks he understands it, and he shakes his head. "Not because I'll want validation, doctor. Just because...it's you."

McCoy blinks. His brow furrows, a small you-can't-mean-what-it-sounds-like-you-mean sort of expression.

Pavel doesn't answer, because even he doesn't know what he means. Not exactly. He isn't sure why he feels so strongly towards McCoy, but he does feel it, and he is honest and strong enough to speak out about his feelings, even without certainty.

McCoy turns back to his book after a moment.

Beyond them, on the far side of the room, Rene sits on one of the small bunks and begins his usual nightly practice of cleaning his phaser.

Pavel takes up the padd to re-review the day's notes, and he smiles at his little algebraic doodle before clearing it from the side of the screen and scanning the words instead.


	3. Chapter 3

He has learned to take stock of as much as he can before his eyes ever open. It helped him when the days began to blur together, when he would doze at random times and wake up never sure about what he would find. And it helps him now, in the comfortable warmth of a sickbay bed.

He hears Len breathing, raspy and with the slight catch that says his lungs aren't entirely back to what they were. That sound is the first thing he has taught himself to listen for, and the most important.

After he registers that and reassures himself that Len is here, near to him and still breathing, he can take stock of other things. The softness of the cot, the sheets over him, the warmth of the air. The beeps of machines around them and the hum of a starship in the very walls around him.

Pavel opens his eyes and squints into the light. He looks to Len – there, calm, awake, unthreatened – before he looks anywhere else.

There's no one sitting on the edges of their beds. No one napping on the chair that's taken up a permanent spot between their jammed-in beds and the wall.

They're alone.

It's the first time since waking up here that there is no one watching. Hikaru and Kirk have gone. No nurse is staring them down, no doctor. Nobody.

Something inside of Pavel relaxes, some small little twinge he hasn't even noticed until it smoothes away.

He rolls carefully on his side – they won't take the IV out of his arm yet – and lets his focus go where it most wants to go.

Len shifts after a moment, dropping his head to the side to look back at him.

Pavel meets his eyes, and after a moment he smiles. "So now," he says, his voice rasping against his throat, "we get over it."

Len's mouth twitches. He pushes onto his side even more gingerly than Pavel did, sucking in a pained breath but smiling back at Pavel when he settles down.

Their beds are much too close. The nurses glare at Pavel as if it's his fault every time they have to squeeze between them. But Kirk must have said something, because no one has actually tried to push them apart, much less order Pavel out of what should be a one-bed room.

Pavel can reach out without strain and touch the sheets bunched around Len, and he does. His fingertips slip down the sheets without grasping hold, an absent kind of touch.

Len watches him. "You..."

Pavel watches his own wandering fingers. "Mmm?"

Len flashes another small smile. "You're so quiet," he finishes. "Haven't been quiet in weeks."

Pavel makes a face. "Doctor's orders," he admits. "M'Benga says I've hurt myself with the talking." Well, he did a fair amount of yelling, screaming, shouting, singing. And he kept it up, as Len says, for weeks. He fell asleep in mid-word and woke up with sentences already forming on his lips.

He doesn't mind. The rasp in his voice is new, and scratchy and unpleasant, but he doesn't mind that either. It might never go away, so he may as well start accepting it.

"There is scarring in my throat," he says, lifting one shoulder in a faint shrug. "And when Hikaru finds his sense of humor again I know that I can count on being teased for talking myself into permanent injury."

Len's eyes drift down to Pavel's mouth, his throat, as if he's talking about visible wounds. His smile fades. He hesitates, shutting his eyes and settling against the pillow as if to sleep.

"I'm too big a coward to ask about my hands."

Pavel hums to himself, unsurprised. Len has miraculously fallen asleep every time M'Benga has come in, and he hasn't once asked Kirk or Chapel about these particular injuries.

"The doctor seems doubtful that you'll recover entirely," Pavel says matter of factly, because Len is scared but he is also obsessing. He can't look at his arms, much less the bandages over his hands. And Len speaking about them just now means he wants to know.

"He is waiting for you to recover more before going after the smallest of the bones that they...broke." Crushed. Destroyed. Ground into fragment and powder.

He can't think of this, he'll lose his calm.

"But he replaced several of the larger bones before either of us woke up. You've lost no muscle control," he says calmly, his eyes on Len's pale face and closed eyes. "The danger is in the nerves."

Len's eyes are too tightly closed to be casual, but he nods. There can't be anything in those words that he didn't already know.

"The doctor thinks that it will take so much work for you to regain normal function, he refuses to even speculate on the odds of your recovering enough to perform surgery again." Pavel smiles to himself. "I have a different theory, of course."

"Yeah?" Len's voice is rough. His eyes stay closed. "What's your theory?"

"Leonard McCoy has always specialized in performing miracles. He has brought crewmen back from the dead, helped them recover from crippling wounds without a single sign anything was ever wrong. He will not fight less hard for himself than he does for others. Because he is too good a doctor to deprive his crew of his services."

Len's eyes open slowly. He looks across the small gap between their beds, looks at Pavel as if searching out the lie he must be telling, or the flattery he must intend.

Pavel of course is not lying, and he doesn't flatter. Len knows him, he knows that he values honesty to the point that it has lost him friends and stirred others' anger.

Pavel smiles against his thin pillow. "You did not survive those creatures in order to give up on your life. I know that, I'm just surprised that M'Benga doesn't seem to."

Len doesn't smile, but the lines around his eyes and mouth ease.

It's good enough to warm Pavel, who has never known a better feeling than making Len smile.

Pavel had one task in that cell, on that planet. To keep Leonard McCoy alive. He wasn't particularly good at it, that task, but in the end they are out and Len is alive, and so he wasn't so bad at it either.

No one assigned Pavel this task, he took it upon himself. For a lot of reasons that aren't worth thinking about ever again, but for one good reason that he is sure of now. A reason he used to imagine was a possibility, but now is as good as any cold, hard fact of physical science.

It is also a fact worth voicing. Pavel looks across the gap at Len's face, at the terror about his future that his eyes can't hide.

"I love you," he says, another matter-of-fact presentation of facts unasked for, simply because he thinks Len ought to know it.

He is a little surprised when Len simply nods. As if of everything he's said, that is the least surprising.

Len's arm slides out from under the sheet. He swallows and drags his eyes downward to look at the bandage making his hand so shapeless and heavy.

Still, he reaches out with that arm, and the edge of the bandage covering his fingertips brushes Pavel's chin before stroking, light and unsteady, down the line of his throat. His possibly permanently scarred throat.

Len seems a little more at peace then, meeting Pavel's gaze. "I know."

* * *

The kid is unnerving, yeah, Len's thought that from the start. But it turns out he's a hell of a good research partner.

He's got endless patience for minutia, he doesn't mind reading the same things again and again. He doesn't mind when Len gets into testing mode and has to repeat the same steps over and over and over and _over_ with frustratingly small variation.

The routine of medical research can drive people nuts. Even Desmarais is going a little stir-crazy, and he's not even conducting the tests. But Chekov dives in again and again, with no sign of his enthusiasm fading.

There aren't a lot of nurses with this kind of patience, much less recruits from other departments. Then again the kid is into science, and pals with Spock, so surely this isn't his first foray with mind-crackingly dull experimentation.

"Doctor..."

Also, unlike other recruits who have been forced to assist Len in testing in the past, this kid is actually right about being able to bend some of his knowledge to Len's aide. Len has learned already to pay attention when the kid speaks, and he does now.

He looks up from the blood samples he's been studying for the last hour. "Mm?"

The kid is frowning at his padd, brow furrowed. He doesn't answer, just sets the padd flat on the worktable in front of him and bends over it, eyes moving back and forth rapidly.

Len waits, but the kid seems to be back in his own world. He looks back down at his blood samples, but sighs. None of it's doing any good. Test after test, change after change, and the cells in these samples are still dying out so fast he can watch it happening.

He frowns and pushes away from the table, standing up and stretching aching shoulders, wincing at the stiffness in his neck. He's still rolling his shoulders as he makes his way around his little lab space to the worktable Chekov's hunched over.

"What's up, kid?"

Chekov looks up at him with frowning eyes. "Something is wrong."

Len raises his eyebrows. "Besides the race of aliens dropping dead around us?"

The kid sighs, for a moment unnervingly Spockish. "Yes, besides that. You have noticed the uniformity in the blood samples the Maalox have been providing us, yes?"

Len nods. "But that's the thing about alien physiology, kid. Just because it all looks the same to me doesn't mean there aren't a thousand difference I just don't know to look for."

"But there are!" Chekov straightens and turns the padd, pushing it across the table at Len.

Len pulls it in obligingly, and sees some sort of spreadsheet laying out data in columns. It's science, not medicine, and he looks across the table at Chekov balefully.

The kid just leans in, not letting him off the hook. "The lines are different samples we have received. The columns are separate elements of information we have been watching - the first is white cell count, the second is oxygen levels in the cells, the third time after exposure before all oxygen has dispersed and the cells have died, and so on. The important thing is..."

Len holds up a hand. He scans the data now that he can understand the way Pavel's charted out the information, and it only takes him a moment to spot what the kid's seen.

"Huh," he says, casting a look over at the trays where the Maalox-provided blood samples are labeled and waiting for further testing.

"You see." It isn't a question. Chekov leans in closer, tapping the padd as he talks. "Over half of the samples we have tested have numbers so close that they are almost indistinguishable. Perhaps a third of the samples are different, and all of those samples vary from each other as well."

Len frowns. "Almost like..."

Chekov nods, confident somehow that Len must be on the same page.

Len thinks about those numbers. "About a third of the samples we're working on we've collected from the bodies of the dead. The rest were brought to us."

"Exactly!"

Chekov's answer is so bright that it draws Len's focus up.

Fuck. Science gets the kid going, that's obvious. His face is all but glowing, his eyes green and sparking bright as he looks at Len. There's excitement all over him, and interest. All shining from that young, open face of his.

The kid never fails to make Len feel older and grittier than he already is, but despite himself he's drawn to it. Seems like it's Len's curse to always be around golden, beautiful people. Weird world.

He clears his throat, his mind obediently chirping at him: _sewenteen_.

"All the samples that the Maalox have been bringing us-"

"-are all from the same person," Pavel finishes happily. "This is why your work is stalling. There is no new data to learn when we are running the same tests on the same person's blood. You see, some of the less degraded samples we pulled from the dead actually show some responsiveness to your tests. There is a cure here, and you may well be close to it! But this person, the one providing the samples, may not be compatible."

"Right." Len pushes away from the table, from Chekov and his bright eyes and open face. He looks to the door, knowing that the men the aliens have left there as 'assistants' have become bored by the work but still must be right outside.

Well, hell. If they're having to rely on the Maalox for supplies to help their work, than he's going to have to let the Maalox know just what's slowing them down. It's probably an innocent mistake, maybe the Maalox figure it's best to drain one person dry than a lot of already-sick people.

He's gonna have to convince them otherwise, and fast.

He's out the door so fast that poor bored Desmarais has to run to catch up to him.

* * *

They take out Pavel's IV and Chapel brings him a steaming bowl of soup, and Pavel looks so baffled by it all that it almost makes Len smile.

Pavel's sitting up in his bed by then – besides the starvation there wasn't much wrong with him. Superficial injuries from the fights he picked with the guards, but they were always happier to focus their energy on Len.

This is the last step before they discharge him, Len realizes, watching him sitting there with a spoon in his hand and the bowl on a tray in front of him.

Then it'll be Len's turn. Without his guard dog here, with his worst injuries healed and the threat of system failure or death now gone, all the things Len hasn't let himself think about yet are going to take center stage.

Christine stands by, watching, but it's Len that Pavel turns to with those wide eyes. "I'm not hungry," he says.

Len lays on his side, watching the kid. He smiles faintly. "Yeah, you are. You're so damned hungry you don't even remember what it feels like. You're way past a rumbling stomach, kid."

Pavel considers that. He turns to the bowl and sighs, trailing the spoon over the surface of the soup. "They will let me go soon."

"That's a good thing," Len says instantly, even as an acid-wash of nervousness churns through his guts.

Pavel glances over. "I am a navigator on a starship," he says slowly.

Len waits, but understands when Pavel doesn't speak more.

Him? He's a doctor. Three weeks in a cell on a planet and that concept seems utterly foreign to him. Three weeks, not even a full month, and he's forgotten what it means to be anything but a prisoner.

What does that say about him? Should he be relieved to know that Pavel feels the same bewilderment about returning to his life?

Once the kid is out there, once he's run the simulators a few times with Sulu and is back in the groove of his job, it'll be like riding a bike. He'll slip right back into it. Len? If he could jump back into his old work as fast? Might be the same.

Moot point. He can't jump back in. Pavel's going to get out and get busy getting over it, and Len is going to be stuck in this bed, in these bandages, with no fucking idea...

"You didn't listen to me before," Pavel says suddenly.

Len looks over. "Mmm?"

Pavel pushes the tray away from him and slips his legs over the bed. He pushes to his feet, sliding into that small gap between their beds though he might be the only person in the world thin enough to fit there right now. He sits down on the edge of Len's bed.

Christine makes a warning noise from her silent guard by the door.

Pavel turns a cold-eyed look on her, but sighs and reaches and slides the tray of soup closer to him so that he can eat where he is. He picks up the spoon, dips it in, and shoots her an are-you-happy-now look.

Christine watches them warily, but she doesn't move in.

Len doesn't make any move to intercede for the kid. He just watches, letting the little show distract him from his morbid thoughts.

Pavel turns back to him as he draws the spoon from the soup.

"I said," he goes on as if Christine never existed, "you did not listen to me before. I can hear your thoughts, you know. I've learned to. When I was being so loud in that cell, you were just as loud as I was. Only you don't realize it."

Len smiles faintly. "You can read my mind, huh?"

"Clearly. You scream when you think, Len." Pavel smiles and leans in, tilting the spoon towards Len's mouth as naturally as he finger-fed him strange stale alien food in the cell.

And naturally as he did back then, Len eats. He's had this soup before, the bland mineral-loaded Starfleet-sanctioned Recovery Broth. It tastes just as great as it sounds, but it's warm and filling and he is a bit hungry.

Pavel watches him approvingly, eyes as bright as ever. "You are thinking that M'Benga is right and that Pasha is wrong. That you aren't going to get your life back." He leans in with another steaming spoonful.

Len sips from the spoon, eyes on Pavel's face.

Christine makes some other sound behind Pavel, like something's going on here that she doesn't like, but Len doesn't pay it any mind.

He regards Pavel, drawing some small comfort from the confidence on his young face. "Some things people just don't recover from, kid," he says quietly.

"You think I don't know that?" Pavel dismisses the words with a gesture of the empty spoon in his hand. "I will tell you why this is not one of those things. Because M'Benga has not so much as unwrapped your hands yet since he first operated, so he is speaking of injuries he knows nothing about. But me? I speak of a man I know a great deal about. And so it's obvious that my opinion should hold more weight than his."

"Yeah? Is that your scientific opinion?"

Pavel grins back before taking the most smug sip of a soup spoon that Len's ever had the privilege to witness. "All my opinions are scientific. It comes with being a genius."

Len laughs softly around his next spoonful of soup.. He swallows the broth and sits back, leaning against the pillow. It's funny, but just as often as he's certain that his life is utterly ended, he can also feel entirely sure that everything is going to be fine.

Like Pavel says, his hands aren't even unwrapped. He is still half-looped with painkillers. He hasn't even started recovering yet, really.

It's a little dumb to be so cynical so fast, right?

With Pavel there, stretching out a carefully-leveled spoonful of broth and watching him eat it as if Len is the most important thing in the universe, it feels entirely absurd to be the least bit doubtful about his future.

* * *

"It's the Empress."

Those words are the only warning Pavel gets. He looks up from the slide he's studying, blinking in surprise at the anger in Doctor McCoy's voice.

His surprise becomes alarm a moment later, when he sees that McCoy is being pushed through the door by several of those unhappy-looking Maalox, and that more than one of them are holding devices aimed at the doctor's back. Squarish little black metal things, but the way they're holding them tells Pavel that they're weapons.

McCoy isn't even looking at them. He lets himself get pushed through the door but then he's walking on his own, his face creased with anger, his dark eyes light with it. Fury, like he so often shows. A righteous anger.

Someone has not done the Right Thing. Pavel does not need a genius IQ to figure out who that someone is.

"They won't let us have anyone else's blood," McCoy goes on, his hands fisted, his brow set in hard lines. "Because they don't give a shit who else lives or dies. Not when their precious Empress is dying."

Pavel looks from McCoy to the armed aliens, uncertain. Should he back away from the table? Keep working? Are the weapons what it took to get McCoy to give up his argument, or are they here for another purpose?

Where is Rene? He left with McCoy, running to catch up after McCoy left so abruptly. But he isn't here.

Pavel looks from the Maalox to McCoy, unsure.

McCoy is perhaps a little more angry than his usual righteous-anger fits. He grabs a glass case, the slides of a dozen samples that they thought were all different before realizing what the Maalox were doing.

He turns to the aliens at the door, waving the case. "This isn't gonna save her life! I can't do anything with this! I have to have more if you want any of these people to live."

He looks like he wants to throw the glass case at the silent figures, but he's too good a doctor to risk it. There is disease in those blood samples, after all.

"Shit!" McCoy turns back to the table and slams the case down hard enough to rattle the samples inside. "A fucking week we've wasted here. I'm not wasting anymore. Either you let us help your people or we're getting the hell off this rock!"

Pavel is aware that most human vernacular, profanity and the like, won't translate the Maalox language through the very basic translators Nyota was able to program for them. But there is no mistaking the doctor's tone.

He is suddenly very nervous looking from the doctor to the aliens. He even opens his mouth to voice a mild objection to the doctor's confrontational attitude towards these beings they are alone on a planet with.

But his mouth closes, and he looks over at the research they have done so far. Test after test of flawed experimentation. Wasted time. How many of these aliens have died since they arrived? How many will die before they can get their research on the right track and actually have a chance at finding a cure?

His anger is less intense than McCoy's. His annoyance is for the wasted time, the flawed science. Every theory they have come up with in the last week is incorrect, useless.

Pavel feels the injustice of not doing the Right Thing much less strongly than McCoy does. But he will not object to McCoy's anger.

He regards the aliens again. They are a small, unfriendly and unsophisticated planet, and he and McCoy are Starfleet officers. They will give in to what McCoy asks for, or the Enterprise will cut its brief side-mission short and will pick them up sooner than scheduled.

"Doctor?" he asks quietly, hushed, scared to intrude in whatever this is. It feels bigger than his experience, and he doesn't want to make anything worse. "Where is Lieutenant Desmarais?"

McCoy's glare doesn't ease. "These overbearing shitheads grabbed him when he drew his phaser. He's okay, kid."

Pavel doesn't relax. McCoy doesn't sound very convinced of those last words.

The aliens at the door, like the ones constantly watching over them since they started their work, remain quiet and mostly impassive. But another comes through the door after a minute, and he is familiar.

Their diplomatic contact, the Speaker for the Empress.

He rumbles something in that strange staccato language, and the translator in Pavel's ear tells him the man is saying "You are the to be of help to her," which rough as it is still speaks amazingly highly of Nyota's skills at linguistics and a new language she was exposed to for a matter of days.

McCoy answers fast. "We can't help her, I told you. These tests keep failing because her case is too advanced. There is no help for her anymore. But there is help for the thousands of others who are dying."

"No there is others the. You are the to be of help to _her_."

"She is already dead, god damn it!"

Pavel hisses in a breath at the way the Speaker recoils. "Doctor..." he says quietly. "Are you sure this is what we should be doing?"

McCoy shoots him an incredulous look that eases when he seems to see that Pavel means the question without recrimination. That Pavel is actually sincerely uncertain.

He hesitates, shooting a look at the Speaker, who is now in angry, hissing conversation with the other guards. They speak too fast for the translator to pick up.

He looks back at Pavel and shakes his head. "We can't do anything else, kid," he says, and the words sound like an apology.

Pavel doesn't need that. He trusts McCoy. He is in over his head, he has no experience telling him how to move and what to feel about the way the Maalox are suddenly talking about them, but he does trust McCoy.

He can only hope the doctor has some bigger plan in mind, because at this moment things don't seem to be going particularly well.

* * *

Hikaru seems nervous as he stands in the doorway and watches Pavel look around.

Pavel isn't sure why he should be nervous, or if Pavel's own behavior is contributing to it, but he can't bring himself to worry about it. It isn't in his nature to temper his reactions, and Hikaru is his best friend because Hikaru has always accepted him on his own terms.

"I thought about coming in to dust a little before bringing you here," Hikaru says, grinning through his discomfort. "But. Starship. You know. Not a lot of dust floating around. Thought about watering your plants, but then I remembered that you weren't me."

Pavel laughs at that softly. Hikaru has tried repeatedly to convince him to place a plant or two in his quarters, but Pavel hasn't given in yet. Which he is glad of now, because he would have thought about it back on that planet. He would have had visions of a poor leafy green thing sitting abandoned in the dark, shriveling for want of food and water. Dying unnoticed by the world just outside the door.

He moves past the photographs of his father and brothers, the old picture of his dead mother. He trails his fingers over the spines of books crammed into the small shelf that's all he can fit in his little room.

He looks in vague interest at the crumpled uniform on the floor, laying just where he left it over a month ago, when a late morning kept him from tidying up before his first away mission.

He remembers excitement.

He was nervous, his stomach churning with fear but his body, his mind, moving at double-time to prove himself.

He checked his seams so carefully before he left this room the last time. He fussed with his uncooperative curls for minutes before rolling his eyes at his reflection and telling himself sternly that the mission didn't hinge on his hair being acceptably tidy.

Remembering it now, Pavel smiles to himself. An entire lifetime has been lived between those memories and this present, and he smiles at his old foolishness the way he smiles to think of the first star charts he ever drew as an overly precocious five year old.

His hair, his seams, he focused on those not because he thought they affected the mission, but because he didn't want any reason to draw the displeasure of one Doctor McCoy.

A different man entirely than Pavel's Len, of course. But Pavel is a different man than that boy making faces at himself in the mirror.

He leans down and picks up that crumpled uniform, ignoring the flash of light-headedness that comes when he straightens again.

For a moment he can't remember what he does with his dirty clothes. He frowns around him, the small bed, the small shelves. The only door is a bathroom, but there's no...

Ah. Of course. He smiles and moved to the wall, pressing his hand on the panel to slide open the recycler. With an amused smile he drops the uniform inside and the panel slide closed.

It's a strange thing. This room with its cramped space, its four walls, could be just another cell. But there are books to read, computers to supply him whatever he wants, and a recycler to take away the things he rejects.

And there is no Len.

Quite a different kind of cell.

He draws in a breath, amused by his tour of his old life but ready for it to be over.

He turns to Hikaru and speaks, though he's not supposed to except in emergencies. "We can go back now."

Hikaru blinks. "Go back where?"

Pavel tilts his head, unamused just like that. "Hikaru. I'd like to go back."

Hikaru steps in, brow furrowed. "I...sorry, Pasha, back _where_? Back to sickbay?" He lowers his voice, studying Pavel with those dark, worried eyes. "You remember they discharged you?"

Pavel nods – of course he remembers. But they didn't discharge Len. Nothing is over. Nothing has changed.

Hikaru searches him warily, the way he searches plants from alien planets that he is unfamiliar with. Hikaru is more aware than most that the flora on a new planet can be as dangerous or moreso than the fauna, that is why he studies it so gravely.

Pavel smiles to think of himself as a dangerous plant, but the smile fades because he too easily pictures again that fictional plant left to wither and die in this very room.

"Why don't we go get something to eat?" Hikaru says after a moment, sounding unsure. "You think you can handle the mess right now?"

Something to eat. Pavel nods. They tell him he needs to eat more, and the soups they bring in sickbay aren't nearly adequate to help Len recover.

He smiles at Hikaru, who continues to give him the dangerous-plant look even as he smiles back.

* * *

The door closes behind them with a horrible grinding rusty sound, and Len tries not to notice how hard the kid flinches when it clangs shut.

He speaks fast to cover his own worry, and his even stronger sense of guilt. "Look...kid."

Chekov turns to him, dinner-plate eyes set in scared white skin.

Len stamps down at that guilt, and when the voice in his head tells him _seventeen_ it's not in the snide way that means he needs to curtail a wayward train of thought. This time the_ seventeen_ chimes low in his mind, like an epitaph.

He clears his throat fast. "Before you have a chance to freak out here, kid, I gotta tell you I've been in worse spots before. A hell of a lot worse. This isn't what it feels like, okay? It's all...it's diplomacy."

"Diplomacy." Pavel nods tersely, the fear undiminished.

"Right." Len waves a hand, turning away from that fear to check out this place they've ended up in. "Hardly even unusual."

"Where is Rene?" The question spills out, fast, like the kid is scared of hearing a particular answer. "Will they bring him here? What have they..."

"Diplomacy," Len says again sharply. He tries not to think of that soft-spoken security officer and his little goattee, his pretentious accent and the way he mocked Len for mocking it.

Desmarais is fine, wherever they hauled him off to. There's no alternative that makes sense.

"When we don't call in and report this evening," he keeps going, though he couldn't have said if it was for Pavel's benefit or for his own, "Jim'll get the ship back here without hesitating. He'll have these idiots eating out of his hand before morning. This kind of thing...it's politics. No hick planet wants to start a war with the Federation."

Pavel sags against the wall. He doesn't answer, he doesn't seem particularly relieved. But he stays quiet.

Len looks around, but there's not much to look at. The place is medieval, like so much on this planet. No windows, no bars. Stone walls, stone floor, stone ceiling, and a small dip in the floor in a back corner with rusted bars going across a hole maybe the size of Len's hand wrist to tip. A drain of some kind.

Better not be the kind he's thinking of.

He snorts to himself, folding his arms over his chest. There's nowhere for air to come in, except that little drain, but it's about ten degrees colder than it was in the drafty hallway outside.

It's not the worse spot he's ever been in planet-side, but it doesn't feel like a real fun place to kill an evening.

_Time for those instincts to kick in, Jim. _

Len sighs and looks back at the kid, ready to get his half-assed pep talk going again if it's needed.

Chekov leans against a wall, hugging his arms across his chest, obviously feeling the cold too. He looks over when he feels Len's eyes, and it's hard to tell if he could use the pep talk or not. Len can't read the kid yet, not entirely, though he's better at it thanks to the last few days than he was before the assignment.

Well, hell. Nothing wrong with distraction either way, is there?

He moves to the wall across from Chekov, slipping down the stone to sit against the wall. He stretches his legs out in front of him and crosses his ankles, and it's almost nice to be idle after five days and nights of research and theory.

"So," he says, his voice sounding too loud after the silence. He clears his throat, dropping the volume a little with a crooked smirk. "What makes a genius Russian kid want to join Starfleet?"

Chekov looks over at him, incredulous.

Len shrugs. "Got something better to do right now?"

Chekov blinks, thinks about it. He smiles faintly, nervous, and slips down to sit cross-legged on the stone floor. "Then I wonder if you're actually interested in an answer or just filling the silence?"

Len chuckles. "Can't I be both?"

Chekov - well, if they're gonna play hostage together he can allow the kid a first name: _Pavel _smiles back. "_Quid pro quo_, then, doctor. If I bore you with my Russian childhood will you answer the great mystery of why a man who despises technology and the universe as a whole joined Starfleet himself?"

Len flashes a wry grin. "Never made a mystery of that answer, kid, it was the-"

"Doctor."

He hesitates, eyebrow arching.

"Your ex-wife is not the queen of earth."

His eyebrows hike even higher up.

Pavel looks almost admonishing. "There were other places you could have gone after a divorce without leaving the planet. This is why the truth is a mystery – because you tell such a silly lie and most people accept it."

"Huh." Well, it's not Len's favorite topic and he doubts he's gonna spill his guts to the kid, _quid pro quo _or not.

Still. He can't help a chuckle. "Jim told me before we came down to be extra careful with his precious navigator. He thinks you're scared of me. I'm starting to think he's a complete idiot."

"An idiot with disproportionately strong diplomatic skills, though, yes?" Pavel smiles. "The captain thinks that I fear you and you think that I want you to fawn over me and tell me I'm a genius."

Len grins. "So you're saying Jim and me are both dumbasses, is that it?"

Pavel blinks wide, innocent eyes at him. "I would never say such a thing about my superiors. But if you choose to put those words into my mouth, who am I to argue?"

"So if you're not scared and you don't give a shit if I fawn over you or not...what's the truth?"

"What the truth always is – something in between." Pavel shrugs.

Damn it, but Len's kind of starting to like the kid. Used to be he was all bright eyes and _sewenteen_, but the last few days have taught Len a lot more about him.

He's fucking smart, and he's sharp. Two different types of intelligence, but it's rare that people are strong in both. Plus he's got balls; that's something Len always appreciates in other people.

Pavel smiles after a moment. "I will tell you stories of my path to Starfleet, then? And you will tell me of your ex-wife and why she was able to drive you from your planet. And we will pass the time while Captain Kirk practices his diplomatic skills."

Len sits back, gesturing airily for him to proceed. And hell, maybe when the kid's done Len will see his part through after all. Maybe he'll talk a little about Joce, about his kid. Get the genius eccentric Russian perspective on the whole thing.

Maybe he's a little too interested in what the Russian perspective is towards things. He's supposed to be distancing himself from this weird lonely hormonal attraction. He's supposed to be _sewenteening _himself, not encouraging it.

But Christ, he's sitting in a prison cell freezing his way through an evening, waiting on Jim Kirk to swoop in and get him out.

He should be allowed to indulge himself for a night.


	4. Chapter 4

When he's on his fifth nurse-check of the night without the slightest indication of sleep coming, Len gives up the idea of resting. He stops trying to force his eyelids closed and he frowns up at the ceiling.

The sound of rusting beside his bed makes him want to sigh again. Instead he just turns his head towards the dark silhouette in the chair beside him.

"Is there something specific you're hoping for?"

Jim doesn't insult Len by pretending to be asleep. His eyes pop open - Len catches the glint of them in the never-total-darkness of sickbay.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean...I'm not dying, I'm not all that bad off." Except for the things that _are _bad off, but they're not worth thinking about right now. "But you keep coming around like you're waiting on something. I don't know what, but I've got a pretty good idea I'm not doing it yet."

Jim leans in, stiff from his awkward perch in that chair. He studies Len's face, unnervingly serious.

Len wants to look away from him, but he started this so he can't. "I get this feeling like I'm letting you down somehow, so whatever it is you gotta let me know because I'm drawing a blank."

There's a brief pause. "Maybe the chairs in these rooms are just really comfortable, you ever think about that?"

Len smiles faintly. "You forgetting how many times our positions have been reversed? I know better than anyone that these chairs could go down with iron maidens and Romulan Rope Binding as a potent form of slow torture."

Jim grins back. "Got me there. My ass hasn't been this numb since the time-"

"And that's where you can just stop, Jim. For God's sake."

Jim laughs, that wicked giggle of his that Len hasn't heard enough since the kid made Captain and decided he had to be a grown-up.

Len manages a chuckle of his own, but his eyes drift back to the ceiling and the room feels cold, and even though Jim's giggling in his ear he feels disconcertingly alone.

"So what is it?" he asks after a moment, his voice sounding much too grave. "What are you waiting on?"

"You to fall asleep," Jim answers easily.

Len's eyes drift to the side, to the empty space where the second bed has been removed from the room. He answers quietly, but honestly. "I haven't fallen asleep without his voice in my ear for a month now."

Jim shifts quietly in his chair. "You're gonna have to get used to it again, though, right?"

Len doesn't answer. That falls under the category of things not worthy to think about, much less answer aloud.

Pavel wants to be here talking him to sleep, Len knows that as strongly as he knows anything. Len won't have to get used to anything if they'll just let the kid come back here where he belongs.

And, okay, even as he thinks that Len knows, intellectually, how fucked up it is. Jim's right - he can't go through the rest of his life needing a big-eyed kid with a funny accent talking him to sleep every night. That's about ten different kinds of dysfunctional, and Len's got too many dysfunctions as it is.

But he learned a few things sitting in that cell. He learned that there are more important things than pride, that just because something might be altogether fucked up, if that something works, if it helps, than that's the only thing that matters.

"You gonna tell me what's going on with you two?" Jim asks suddenly.

Len looks over.

Jim leans in, close enough that the details of his expression can be seen clearly in the dim light. His brow is lined, his eyes are old. Too serious.

"I should have formally debriefed you by now. Both of you. I haven't, because I'm a sucker for my friends and I've gone through enough disastrous missions myself to know that waiting is better, if not smarter. But I'm going to have to do it sooner or later. The whole thing; you know the drill. Record an official log of the session, get every detail possible from you, submit it back to Starfleet for review."

Len's stomach churns just a little bit at the thought of talking about it. He's safe from it right now, but when Jim does corner him with the official Captain Kirk look on his face...that's going to be a bad day.

"So maybe you should let me know in advance some of the things we're gonna have to leave out of the official records."

Len blinks over at Jim. "Leave out?"

Jim sighs as if Len's missed some obvious clue. "About the kid, Bones. About whatever it is that happened between the two of you that makes him look at you the way he does. And makes you so fucking nervous when he's not around that you can't fall asleep."

Len opens his mouth, and he's so close to answering Jim with Pavel's words. So close to saying 'he loves me' and letting that be his easy answer.

But he hesitates.

It's _too _easy an answer. Jim...God bless the man, he's an amazing captain and a complicated soul, but he'll take those words to mean that Len and Pavel must've fucked, and that's the answer to everything.

That's not fair to Pavel, or Len, and it's so far from what happened that it would feel like a lie.

Jim sits back, and the moments tick by with no answer.

"You know," Jim says suddenly, his voice low and easy, "in my egotistical moments, as rare as those are, I could list a million good things about myself. I can talk for so long about my own misunderstood brilliance that I could fill books."

Len doesn't snort, doesn't make a comment about how that wouldn't surprise anyone who's ever met Jim Kirk.

He can hear in Jim's voice that this is leading to something, and he waits for it to get there.

"But just because I'm capable of appreciating my own greatness doesn't mean I don't know my own faults. I know all the ways I fail, I just choose not to brag about those. But here's an example for you: I am a complete bastard as a friend."

Len looks over in surprise.

Jim smiles faintly, almost sheepish. "Seriously, Bones. I am the most self-centered shit you'll ever meet. I don't take no for an answer, I push my friends past all their comfort levels, I force them to do things they don't want to do. I get them into trouble, I abandon them on the slightest chance I might get laid. I'm obnoxious as a friend, and most people realize that fast and move on. Most people love the hell out of me just long enough to hate me, and I bring it on myself more often than not."

Len doesn't argue - there's a lot of truth in Jim's words, and most of this is things he's told Jim himself. But he has never for a moment thought of Jim as a bad friend.

"Every single person I've ever met," Jim goes on with that same little crooked smile, "has gotten sick of the way I am and taken off. Except for you."

Len swallows, studying Jim's face. "Jim," he says, his voice a croak, "you don't-"

"Shut up, Bones, Captain's talking." Jim sits back, stretching his arms over his head and staring out at the darkness thoughtfully. "See, I was used to being considered temporary before I met you. It wasn't some great tragedy - most people are damned boring after the first few months, so who cares? It was just an extended lesson from when I was a kid - that the only person I had to rely on was me, and that was that."

He shoots Len a grin. "You have any idea how much you freaked me out at the Academy? Every damned day, sending me messages bitching about your classes, talking shit about the other students, griping about space. Listening to me bitch about how I could've taught half the classes I had to take. You never went _away_, Bones."

He sighs, sitting back and shifting his spine as if to find some comfortable way to sit in that evil chair. "It hit me when you smuggled me onto this ship...I mean, I didn't realize it right then, but thinking about it later that's when it hit me. You had the easiest chance in the world to be done with me, but you broke rules and risked your own career to hang on to me. You're not going anywhere. I know..." He smiles, but it's unsteady looking. "I know that doesn't sound like much, but it is. It's everything. You're not going anywhere."

Len draws in a breath, feeling as unsteady as Jim's smile looks. He wants to fist his hands but the bandages won't let him move. He blinks his eyes and they feel hot and dry and after all he's been through he isn't sure why this is getting to him so damned much.

"So...look, you want to know why I'm hanging around here instead of playing Captain? What I'm waiting on? I'm waiting on you, Bones. You're the best friend I ever had, and I'm not leaving without you. And...all I'm asking is for you to be okay with that. Let me be your friend before I have to be the captain, okay? Fucking talk to me about what happened down there, before it has to be official."

"Jim." Len drags air through his lungs, looking away from Jim and his too-bright eyes. He can't put into words how much Jim has already done for him. Pavel was right there, Pavel saved him in a thousand different ways every single day, but above it all there was always Jim.

Above it all, comfort to Len, comfort to Pavel, was the knowledge that Captain Kirk never leaves a man behind, and Jim never abandons a friend, no matter how self-centered he claims to be. Every time his eyes went to the ceiling of that dark cell or the interrogation room he spent so much time in, Len saw right through it. He saw the Enterprise orbiting over his head, and Jim in the captain's chair on the bridge, not resting until he had his men back.

He opens his mouth to say that, any of it, whatever he can get out.

"I'm so fucking tired," is what comes out.

Jim leans in and lays a hand on his arm, and Len flinches but the fear doesn't come. He doesn't lose sight of where he is.

"You can sleep," Jim says finally, as if anything is that easy.

Len shakes his head, shutting his eyes tightly. "I can't."

Not without Pavel, not without that voice and the sound of his breathing and the warmth of his body.

He doesn't say that, because it feels so fucking ungrateful to follow Jim's words about friendship with the implication that Jim isn't enough for Len. He is. Nothing about their friendship is a one way street - he's the best friend Len's ever had as well.

Len blinks his scratchy eyes over at Jim. "I just want to sleep. I'll tell you...everything, anything you want to know. As a friend. But right now I just..."

Jim flashes a smile, looking relieved in some strange way. His fingers tighten around Len's arm for a moment, a quick, gentle squeeze, and he stands up. "I'll go find the wayward Russian. Be okay by yourself for a couple of minutes?"

Len nods fast, gratitude closing his throat up. His eyes burn as Jim strides out of the room with purpose in his steps, and he wonders how the hell a man as smart as Jim Kirk could ever call himself anything but a good friend.

* * *

When they were three months into their five-year assignment, the Enterprise bridge crew got their first real lesson in Not Screwing With Pavel Chekov.

It's one memory that always makes Hikaru smile, and one that he dusts off and remembers every time he needs to remind himself that Pavel isn't the helpless child he so often appears to be.

The kid – and he was still The Kid back then to just about all of them – had been the butt of more than a few jokes. Some about his youth, or his brain. Most, on the bridge at least, about his accent. Starting with the first time he ever had to recite his authorization code twice because the computer didn't register his accent properly, and continuing every time he signed in at the start of shift, or made some shipwide announcement.

Hikaru wasn't innocent of it. He exchanged grins with Kirk, laughs with Nyota. He smirked Pavel's way. Every V the poor kid tried to pronounce, every elongated oo, every overly-guttural h.

Starfleet, the very heart of cultural acceptance and open-mindedness.

But hey, they had to tease The Kid over something. He was seventeen back then, for God's sake. He was this curly-headed little ragdoll and it was better he be teased over his accent than anything harmful.

Besides, he never did anything more than blush and smile and wave off their jokes. He didn't give any indication he was embarrassed. He was so rah-rah for Russia that it made him proud. At least Hikaru figured as much.

Then came that shift three months in.

Everyone knew from the start that there was a problem. When Hikaru got up to the bridge there were more people standing around than usual – the arrivals for the alpha shift were having a hard time signing in at their stations, and the overnight crew couldn't leave until they were formally relieved.

There was a lot of muttering going on, a lot of annoyed stabbing at buttons and shouting at the computers, but Hikaru cast it all a bemused look and headed for the helm.

The usual overnight pilot, Taggart, slid out of the pilot chair and cast Hikaru a greeting grin. "Good luck, Hikaru. Something's going haywire."

Hikaru sat down, fully confident his ship would give him no trouble. "Computer – begin alpha shift. Authorization code seven-eight-charlie-victor-nine."

"_Authorization code not recognized."_

Hikaru blinked at the console, ignoring Taggart's 'told you' over his shoulder. "Computer, acknowledge authorization code seven-eight-charlie-victor-nine."

"_Authorization code not recognized."_

"The hell." Hikaru scowled and looked around to see if this was the same problem keeping the night shift standing at every damned station on the bridge.

Well. Every station but one.

His eyes fell on Pavel Chekov, already signed in, the overnight navigator long gone. The kid was quietly running through displays, doing his standard shift change checks. He was paying no attention to the problems around him, seemingly not even the least bit curious about what had to be a major malfunction.

Strange, because almost every other morning it was the rest of the bridge that was signed on and working while it was Pavel who had to convince the computer to accept his code.

There wasn't a smirk on the kid's face, not a set to his slender shoulders that made him seem any different than normal.

Hikaru wondered.

He looked back at his console. The panel was blank after his unsuccessful sign-on, awaiting his spoken code.

Hikaru looked over at Chekov, so intently ignoring everyone. Happily signed on and prepping for his shift.

Hikaru cleared his throat, speaking quietly though he knew Chekov would hear him. "Computer. Acknowledge authorization code...sewen-eight-charlie-vi..._wictor_-nine."

"_Code accepted. Beginning alpha shift."_

Chekov shot Hikaru an innocent look – not like the innocent looks Kirk faked when he was trying to get away with something, but a look that honestly seemed innocent.

"Good morning, Mr. Sulu."

Hikaru stared at him until the slightest twitch at one side of Chekov's mouth gave him away.

"You sneaky little bastard!"

Chekov just smiled and went back to his duties.

Hikaru laughed, harder by the second as two minutes, then three, ticked by with people only getting more annoyed behind them.

And Hikaru was the only one who caught Chekov's soft, "computer – end simulation PAC-nine," when the captain showed up on the bridge.

He watched Chekov as the captain questioned why half his crew wasn't in their seats five minutes into the shift, and saw not a flicker of anything giving Chekov away at the random, annoyed answers.

Of course when they all tried to show Kirk the problem they were having, the computer recognized their codes at once.

He could hardly wait until the end of shift that day. He could barely stop himself from twitching out of his seat and grabbing Chekov before the kid could get away.

He dragged Chekov to the mess that night demanding to know how he'd altered the voice-recognition software of the Enterprise in such a specific way, and Chekov gave an answer so dense with engineering lingo that Hikaru only then began to realize that the talk was true and the kid was a certified genius.

He was also, apparently, not to be fucked with.

Taggert told enough people about Hikaru signing on and how he'd done it that it became common knowledge that angel-faced Pavel Chekov had been responsible. No one had to ask why, and after that day the open snickers and bad impersonations of The Kid shushed fast and eventually stopped entirely.

After that day Pavel wasn't The Kid anymore – not to Hikaru, at least. The hesitant friendship that had been building between them since the first days of the Narada mission roared into full bloom.

It helped that Hikaru could suddenly see Pavel's devious mind before he saw his age. It helped that Hikaru knew Pavel would fight his own battles in his own ways, rather than taking things lying down.

Hikaru was proud of him, really. He still hasn't told a soul that simulation PAC-nine is still embedded in the computer's memory, and that sometimes a particularly annoying or harsh crewmember will start having trouble making his commands go through.

It always makes him laugh, thinking of those confused voices behind his back, the blustering when Kirk arrived on bridge. The innocent, wide-eyed smile on Pavel's face as he listened to his tormentors vent their frustration that the computer didn't understand them.

It's funny – Hikaru saw Pavel off on his first away mission the way any best friend should, and he patted Pavel's shoulder and wished him luck and tried not to give him too many teasing warnings about the horrors of planetside duty.

He didn't bring up Pavel's strange obsession with Leonard McCoy, not even to say that if the guy can't see past his age and appreciate Pavel for who he is, it's McCoy's loss, not Pavel's. He didn't reassure Pavel – though he wanted to – that McCoy would come to know him better planetside, because Pavel has never had patience for dishonesty and Hikaru had no idea what was going to happen.

It's funny because as Hikaru saw his young friend off, waving from beside Scotty and Kirk as the transporters took them, Hikaru felt like a big brother or something. He felt confident that he did all he could for Pavel.

But he comes to realize in the first few days of the assignment, when his faithful and very-much-present best friend suddenly isn't around, that he saw Pavel off for his own sake, not for Pavel.

It's Hikaru who keeps asking Kirk if he thinks they're really safe on that planet, and if leaving them even with allies is really the right thing to do.

It's Hikaru who stays up too late at night worrying over Pavel being in such close contact with a man he admires. It's Hikaru who can't stop wondering what McCoy's learning about Pavel, if he's giving the kid a chance, if Pavel's going to return to the ship looking for a shoulder to cry on.

Hikaru thinks of Pavel like a kid he's taken under his wing, but when Pavel's gone Hikaru feels the loss like a hollowing-out of his own life. He feels the loss on the bridge, in the mess at meals, in the corridors in the mornings, in his quarters at night.

He misses Pavel's glowing eyes, his brilliant, quick-fire smiles. He misses his strangely hesitant but compulsive physicality, the way he touches Hikaru on the arm or shoulder as they walk or talk, and always seemed surprised to catch himself doing it.

But more than anything, he's darkly amused to realize during sign-on for alpha shift early one morning, as he distantly listens to Pavel's replacement sign in so easily with no delay or confusion or a single i_'wictor wictor' /i_to speak of...

More than anything else, he misses Pavel's voice.

* * *

Jim doesn't even get to finish his sentence.

He strolls into Hikaru Sulu's quarters, almost running into a red-faced and too-thin Pavel Chekov, and he manages to get out, "Hey, kid, got time to stop by sickbay and-" and the kid all but pushes past him and races out the door without a word in answer.

Hikaru's sitting on his stiff little sofa and doesn't move when Chekov runs out. He watches him go, his eyes worried, but when the door slides shut he stays where he is.

His eyes move to Jim. "He tried to get in earlier," he says, and Jim can hear his worry in how deep his voice rumbles from him. "M'Benga wouldn't let him see McCoy. You'd think the doc's still in danger of dying, as crazy as he got after that."

Jim fights a frown, thinking about Len, about his hoarse confession that he can't sleep. The tears in his eyes as he all but begged Jim's permission to bring Chekov back to him.

To a point Jim understands. Of course he does - he's been on a dozen away missions that went horribly wrong. He's been in a cell thinking death was coming, he's been kicked around by oversized aliens threatening his life. He knows what it's like to face down that kind of thing.

He knows how close it can make people, going through that kind of thing together.

But this is something different, and he isn't entirely comfortable with it. It's not healthy, what's happening with them. Bones needs to be healthy right now. As healthy as he can be.

Jim can't stop it as a list of injuries drones through his head in M'Benga's clipped bass voice. He can't help remembering the full scale of those injuries, the sheer length of time it took M'Benga to list them all.

_"How do you want them?"_ M'Benga had asked, detached the way he always seems, but his voice trembling with exhaustion. _"From head to foot or in order of severity?"_

And it was a fucking list. His crushed fingers and shattered wrists were just the start. From head to foot wasn't a figure of speech - he had concussions, cracked cheekbone, cracked jaw, all the way down to missing toenails and flesh burned off the very soles of his feet.

Jim can't handle it. Hasn't found a way to even begin to process it yet.

His best friend, his CMO, his rock. The first and only stable thing in Jim's life, and Jim sent him into the hands of psychopaths and sailed his ship happily away. A month later - four i_fucking/i_ weeks - he finally got back what's left. And he can't...

Well. Hell.

But that's not the point. The point is he's got Bones back now, he's got him safe and if not healthy at least drugged enough that he's not feeling any pain. But there's something lingering, something still wrong, and it's something that Jim can't fix.

It's apparently something that Jim's eighteen-year-old navigator has to fix.

Judging by the way Hikaru is sitting there, blank, staring after his long-gone helm partner, there's something broken in that navigator that Hikaru can't fix either.

Jim sighs, moving over to the chair and stretching out a hand to Hikaru.

Hikaru focuses on him, brow furrowing, but takes the offered hand and lets Jim pull him to his feet.

Jim meets his eyes, smiles faintly. "You remember a couple weeks back, when I told you I couldn't sleep so...you know. You fucked me into a coma."

The worry doesn't leave Hikaru's eyes, but he does manage a tilted smile. "Vaguely."

Bones is the most solid thing Jim's ever had, but Hikaru reached out as Jim dangled off an orbiting drill, and pulled him back onto solid footing. Jim's never been able to forget that. Hikaru was the only thing that anchored him when Len was gone.

Somehow a little of that remains, even though Hikaru's as unsteady with what's happening as Jim is.

Jim returns the smile. "And we said it was a one-time thing - or a three-time thing, in the end, I guess - and then we'd get our pals back and everything would go back to normal."

Hikaru nods, but the smile fades. "Normal feels pretty damned far away, doesn't it?"

Jim lets out a breath, unsurprised but relieved that Hikaru understands. "Yep."

"Come on." Hikaru nudges his arm. "Better make sure Pavel made it to sickbay."

Jim follows him through the door and down the hall, and even though their little chat is unresolved he feels comfortable walking beside his helmsman.

Hikaru has always maintained a certain amount of levelheadedness towards Jim. He hasn't gotten lost in the Captain Kirk Awe that half the crew succumbed to between their first impromptu mission and Jim's official promotion as captain.

Chekov has that awe. Hell, he's one of the worst for it, and his general all-around wide-eyed wonder and polite deference makes it seem that much worse.

Jim...he likes it when people admire him. He's an egotist. It's a flaw he's learned to accept in himself.

But he responds most to the people who don't have that awe. The ones who look right through him but respect him anyway. Bones has always done it. Spock works so amazingly well with him because he does the same thing. And Hikaru has always been more a friend than a junior officer because he's never taken Captain Kirk on reputation alone.

He always looks at Jim with that half-bemused expression in his eyes. The one that says that no matter how incredible Jim might be, he'd be spattered on rocks and then sucked into a man-made black hole if it wasn't for Hikaru.

For all that Jim's got a reputation as a man-whore, he's had thoughts on and off about Hikaru since they fought side by side on that drill. He's attracted to the steadiness in him.

Bones is steady that way, but they became friends too soon, and any attraction Jim had was subverted from the start because it wasn't worth losing the friendship.

The only other crewmember he's ever thought he could actually get serious about is Spock. But Spock doesn't have Hikaru's amiable, easy-going nature. Spock is constantly tense, high strung, so worried about succumbing to his human side that he's walking a tight-rope every moment of the day. Spock needs a steady and supportive mate, and Jim ain't that. Jim needs a steadying hand himself, he can't be the support for someone else.

Breaking down and sleeping with Hikaru was a mistake. But it was the best mistake he could have made.

Hikaru gets them to sickbay while Jim's still crawling around in his own head. He barely registers the swish of the sickbay doors, the distant greeting of the night-shift nurse.

He does come back to himself as they approach the room they've stashed Bones in. He comes back to the present hard as Hikaru pushes the door open into the dim stillness of the room.

Bones is asleep already.

It should be a relief. It is. Jim's relieved. There's no fear etched in Bones' face anymore, no stress. He's calm in sleep.

It's everything Jim wanted to see.

Chekov has jammed his way into the bed beside him. Bones is pressed up against him, back to chest, and Chekov's hand strokes through his hair as he murmurs quietly in his ear.

Jim and Hikaru stand there, unnoticed.

Hikaru glances at Jim, no relief in his own face. "He won't eat," he says quietly. "Pavel. I can't make him eat, and I have no fucking idea why."

Jim returns his baleful stare. "You've got to report to Chapel tomorrow, right? About the kid's progress? Tell her. Maybe they'll stick him back in here for a while, but...Bones can't sleep without him. Maybe it'd be best for both of them."

Hikaru raises an eyebrow. "Forgive me if I can't see the bright side of finding out that the psychological damage to my best friend requires ongoing medical care."

Jim shrugs. "It's been less than two weeks since they got back. Normal's still kind of far away from here, you know?"

Hikaru sighs, looking back at the bed.

Bones sleeps on, and Pavel either hasn't noticed them or they rate so unimportant compared to the man sleeping beside him that he can't be bothered to look their way.

Hikaru moves in, arm brushing against Jim's. He nudges his hand over until his knuckles skim Jim's. "So for now there seems to be a new normal."

Jim glances over, a little hopeful sparkle of heat in his stomach. He smiles faintly. "Well. We can make that work, can't we?"

* * *

When the door opens, Len rouses himself from a neck-crackingly uncomfortable drowse. Right away when he sees the displeased looking Maalox, he thinks _thatta boy, Jim._

The Maalox - neither of the oversized grey-tinged shits are the Speaker, and the Speaker's the only one they've been even remotely introduced to - move into the little stone room and look down at Len and Chekov.

Len figures Jim's involved somewhere - it's been all night without contact, and Jim doesn't need more than one night to pull a Constitution-class starship around and jet in to rescue his wayward crew.

But...something about the speculative way the aliens are regarding them makes his nerves chime in, pessimistic as nerves always are.

Len sits up. By his side Chekov sits, back to the wall, unmoving. He isn't even pretending to be able to sleep - his eyes are wide open, as scared as they were the night before, only now they're rimmed with the red of the sleep-deprived.

One of the Maalox takes in the kid, nods his chin towards him and clacks out a few words in their rhythmless language.

Len pushes to his feet before he can even think. His body groans in complaint, spine twisted from an uncomfortable nap on a stone floor, but he ignores it.

"You guys want something?" he asks, his voice steady, if not overly aggressive. He isn't about to steer himself into some diplomatic incident if these guys really are just here to sight-see or something.

They exchange looks and the larger of the two peers back at Len like he's trying to figure out what's under his skin.

Len returns his stare, his fists clenching at his sides.

This isn't Jim's doing. These guys aren't scared of anything, and they're sure as hell taking their sweet time.

So this isn't rescue, it isn't an ending. It's something else.

Len swallows and faces the both of them, ignoring Chekov even when he hears the shifting behind him that means the kid's getting to his feet.

These guys want their precious Empress to be healthy, right? Len can handle getting pushed around a little, threatened. He's the doctor here, after all. He's the one who made the call, who said no to wasting his time trying to save one terminal patient while hundreds who can be saved die around him.

He's ready for this. Sure, even on a danger-magnet like Jim Kirk's ship this isn't the kind of situation a Starfleet officer is supposed to find himself in. But just because Len's a doctor doesn't mean he's not also a soldier.

He folds his arms over his chest, sticking his chin out. Not to pick a fight, but not letting himself get overlooked. Especially not if getting overlooked means their eyes go to an innocent little boy genius like Chekov.

"Well?" he barks out when the two hulks don't move.

The smaller of the two jumps a little at the sharp word. The bigger one just turns to him more fully, and obviously has his decision made for him.

Len doesn't fight when the approach, he doesn't turn back when Chekov makes a small, scared little sound behind him. He lets them grab either arm, but when they steer him towards the door he walks out between them on his own power.

* * *

She is supposedly a good woman. A good nurse. Len's favorite from a small but distinguished list of nurses he has worked with in his career.

But if she doesn't get to the point, Pavel is going to get out of his chair and walk out the door and leave her soft words and intent, thoughtful eyes behind.

"Yes," he says, clipped and impatient as she asks the same question for the fifth time. "I would be more at ease if you let me see Len first. I don't see why that should come as any surprise to anyone."

"Doctor McCoy is in no danger," Chapel says. She's got a low voice for a woman, one of those voices that can be almost gravelly. It is, supposedly, sexy on a woman. Pavel's never understood that, nor any of the hundred other things that are supposedly sexy on women.

"You have been given updates of his recovery, haven't you? You're aware that his life is in no danger. And I know for a fact that you saw him hours ago, as he slept. So tell me why you're driving yourself to distraction about his welfare now."

Pavel stares at her, annoyed. "I'm fairly confident that you're aware of what he has gone through. Why are you _not _distracted with worry about his welfare?"

"I'm a nurse, Mr. Chekov," Chapel answers evenly. "When I see a hopeful prognosis for a healthy adult patient, I allow myself to set worry aside."

Pavel shakes his head, looking back towards the door out of her small office. "Then you don't understand a single thing, and I doubt any answer I can give would satisfy you."

"You think Leonard isn't safe here?"

Pavel rolls his eyes and sits back, staring at her.

She quirks up a single eyebrow, and it's odd how much this throaty blonde woman can remind Pavel of Spock.

"You must not have much faith in our abilities. Then again, you refuse to believe that we can manage something as basic as feeding him, surely you doubt we can actually heal him."

Pavel snorts, trying for the sort of contempt Len can manage so easily, but it sounds weak to his own ears. First Hikaru, now Chapel, harping on his not being hungry as if it means a thousand grim, horrible things. As if it anything but a normal physiological reaction.

He debates sitting there in silence and letting her ramble on with her shallow observations, but he needs to get out of this office and check on Len. So he speaks.

"Nurse Chapel, I really don't need to talk about my behavior. I've probably read as many books about mental and physical reaction to unpleasant events as you have. There isn't a thing you can tell me that I don't already know."

"A genius like you? I'm sure there isn't."

He scowls at her, but she regards him calmly and there doesn't seem to be any contempt in her voice. Not open contempt, anyway.

Still, he sits up a little straighter and schools his expression. "I am not such a child that I'm not able to apply what I know to my own situation. Yes, I am fixated on Len. Yes, I am troubled about his recovery, and its importance is in my mind greater than my own recovery. I'm sure that's a common pathology in situations like ours, yes?"

She stirs after a pause, when she understands he's waiting on her answer.

"Yes," she says calmly. "And no doubt you can tell me all about the psychology of torture, of the men who wrote the theories, the tests that validated them, the exceptions to the rules. But I can tell you something that no one else has been able to, Mr. Chekov."

Pavel would be amused if this woman didn't stand between him and Len. "And what is that, Nurse Chapel?"

"I can tell you why you're not eating."

He lets out a sigh that's almost a growl. "I'm not _hungry."_

"Of course you are. And I've watched you eat." She smiles, and it's small and sad and it makes him suddenly nervous. "But you won't eat unless Len is with you and you can be sure he is fed first."

Pavel's chest clenches. He looks away from her and her sympathetic eyes. "You focus on food as if it means something," he complains, quiet.

"Doesn't it? I'm fairly sure that it means everything."

"That's ridiculous."

"Oh? Then I'll explain the thought behind my guess, and you can tell me where I went wrong to come up with something so ridiculous."

"Why am I even in here talking to you?" Pavel asks, scowling at his lap. "You're no counselor."

"I'm the closest to a proxy we have when our resident psychologist is unavailable."

"He's available," Pavel retorts, feeling sick to his stomach. "You just won't let me see him."

"You were in the same cell as Leonard during your time on that planet," she goes on, stepping on his last words. "You had your small share of bruises, superficial sprains, that sort of thing. Trifles, really. Symbolic, but not the injuries a real victim would suffer."

He looks up then, his breathing uneven. He tries to glare at her, but can't manage control of his own facial expression.

She looks back, impassive as ever. "It's Leonard who took the punishment. It's Leonard that they hurt, time and time again, day after day. And when they were done with him they left him at your healthy, unharmed feet."

"Stop it."

"And you couldn't stop it. Maybe you tried, maybe that's why they swatted you aside and gave you those little injuries. Maybe you didn't try. Maybe you were glad it wasn't you."

Pavel stands up. It's an automatic reaction, his feet simply act and his body follows the cue. He feels unsteady on his feet.

"You have no idea what-"

"In the end they were stronger. They were the captors, they had the control, and they went after Leonard whether you tried to stop them or not. In the end, Mr. Chekov, there was nothing you could possibly do. The only thing you could offer Leonard in his suffering was every single scrap of food those aliens brought you."

The words are cold, splashing over him like water, but Pavel only feels panicked for a moment. For just the briefest second, between an inhaled breath and a rush of exhaled air, he can feel his own trapped guilt, he can hear the distant screams, the thuds and snaps and hoarse shouts, the grunts of the guards. Hour after hour, day after day.

For a moment he is back there.

But then, just as quickly, he isn't. He blinks and releases that trapped gasp from his lungs, and he raises his eyes and looks at the nurse.

"Not the only thing," he says, and his voice is trembling but he doesn't pay it any mind. "I could keep him off the cold floor, and hold him when he slept, and speak to him to fill the silence. And I did that, too. I fed him everything they brought us until he stopped being able to eat, and by then I had no idea what hunger was, so when they brought us food it sat there and rotted."

He looks at her, at her calm eyes starting to show strain around the corners. He swallows to steady his voice and unclog his throat.

"I _know_ all this. I know it better than you, better than Hikaru and Kirk, even better than Len himself. There is nothing you can tell me about what I've done that I don't tell myself. You are trying to show me that I feel guilty? Are you _insane_ that you think I've somehow overlooked my own guilt?"

He moves in, up to the side of the desk that sits between them. He meets her eyes. "Do you think it is an epiphany? Do you think there is some kind of magic in the act of diagnosis? There isn't. I understand that I am guilty. I know that Len isn't dying, and of course I don't think that you or anyone on this ship would neglect him or let him starve. But knowing that changes i_nothing_./i"

Pavel feels his own words losing their already tenuous grasp on control, and he stops fighting it. He shakes his head, his eyes burning, and turns to the door.

"I am going to check on Len because until I do I can barely breathe. Point to the causes all you want, it doesn't make the need go away." He moves to the door, alert to any sound. But she doesn't move and doesn't protest.

He ends up hesitating, blinking blurring eyes out through the glass of the door towards the shut door and quiet room where Len is waiting, needing him.

"I know I'm unfit for duty like this," he says to the glass, his voice thick and struggling. "But I can't make it stop. Can you tell me how to do that?"

She doesn't answer.

He pushes through the door.

As he approaches Len's door, blind to anything else happening in the sickbay around him, it occurs to him that he left something out just then. He didn't tell her that seeing Len, feeding him, talking to him, might be born from guilt but it's still the greatest feeling in the world.

Maybe it's guilt - of _course _it's guilt - but it's real.


	5. Chapter 5

His hands fly to his mouth. He can't move, can't speak. A sound comes from behind his hands, something that would embarrass him at any other time, but he can't think of that now.

All he can think is...

Nothing. Nothing coherent. There are fragments of _oh my god _and _this isn't real_ and a few other half-formed reactions he can't put a voice to.

Even when they release their tight grips on McCoy's arms and he simply drops to the floor as if his strings were cut, Pavel still can't move at first.

They took him away to hurt him. It...doesn't make sense. There can be nothing productive in...

But they did. They have hurt him, and...and _badly_, and what could they gain from it? Why would they...?

He manages to make his feet move, crossing the floor and dropping to his knees beside McCoy. He reaches out a hand, but it slows and stops before it can touch McCoy.

His uniform is ruined: Starfleet uniforms are designed to be sturdy under any possible situation. They don't simply tear. To cut into one takes real effort. But McCoy's is slashed in a dozen places. The front of his jacket is little more than red-stained scraps hanging by threads.

There is blood. It's all over McCoy's skin, staining his clothes. It fills the air, making Pavel's breaths thick and iron-tinged. One gasp is enough to make his mouth taste metallic.

He isn't a child - he knows that things like this happen. He knows some people, some groups, some entire species, are capable of evil deeds.

But he has never knelt on a cold stone floor a foot away from the evidence.

The doctor might be unconscious, or he might simply be unable to move and unwilling to open his eyes. Pavel can't tell, and isn't sure which he hopes for.

He reaches out again, but again can't quite bring himself to touch. There is a sharp burn in his stomach, like his fear has boiled over but has no way to escape and the pressure is just building inside of him.

McCoy was wrong: Captain Kirk isn't here, and this, what these monsters have done to a good man, is not politics.

He wills himself to push his hand in the extra few inches, until his fingertips stroke feather-light over an unblemished few inches of McCoy's arm.

"Doctor?" he says, and his voice catches in his throat.

McCoy's eyes shut tighter - just enough to prove that it's will, not unconsciousness, keeping them closed.

Pavel swallows down his fear - this man is a doctor, after all, and no doubt he has had to be the healer to others when he was afraid.

Besides...it's McCoy.

"Doctor." Pavel speaks again quietly. "They're gone. It's just me here."

His eyelids open slowly, and McCoy's gaze finds Pavel and stays there. His eyes are too bright and damp, his fear and confusion - his expression seems to show exactly what Pavel feels, that this is madness, that there is no reason for this, that there is nothing they can do to stop it - visible on his usually guarded face.

Pavel thinks suddenly, strangely, on his theories about Doctor McCoy. That he is such a bristling, openly snide man because he hurts so strongly it is a weakness. That his bluster is a shield.

The shield is gone right now. His pain is as obvious as the bruises growing darker on his face. He is as shocked by this as Pavel. He is a realist just as Pavel is, a man who knows full well that prisoners are weak and jailors can be sadistic in response to that weakness. But it seems surreal that this mission, the medical research, a disease and a planet of unfriendly allies, could dissolve this way.

Doctor McCoy isn't a doctor right now. He isn't a higher rank, or the captain's friend, or the fascinating complex man Pavel has felt so drawn to.

He is just a man in pain, and Pavel is the only thing that he's been given for comfort.

He braves more than he might have any other time, settling down beside McCoy, folding his legs under him and nudging McCoy's shoulders over until his head can lay in Pavel's lap and not on the frigid stone.

McCoy's eyes don't close, but they don't follow Pavel's face. He looks out at nothing, and Pavel sits in silence and watches his skin pale to white and strokes his arm lightly as shock overtakes him.

* * *

_"...pridyot serenkiy volchok/On ukhvatit za bochok/I utashchit vo lesok/Pod rakitovy kustok..._"

Len smiles into the pillow at the soft voice, the sing-song words. It's familiar - Pavel has sung this to him before, but he doesn't know what it means.

He can feel the threading of fingers through his hair as he comes slowly up out of sleep. His body is heavy under the sheets but his mind is strangely at ease. He must have slept for a while - he feels more rested than he has in...over a month, that's for damned sure.

He shifts onto his side, towards the soft voice, and opens his eyes when he knows Pavel will be the first thing he sees.

Pavel is sitting in what Len's starting thinking of as Jim's chair. He is pulled right up against the bed, leaning his elbow on the mattress as his other hand soothes through Len's hair.

The kid smiles when Len looks at him, letting his song fade away.

"Thought you were supposed to keep quiet," Len murmurs, voice thick with sleep. "Doctor's orders."

Pavel shrugs, not bothering to explain what he's doing, since they both know. "Mr. Spock is watching us from the doorway," he says softly.

Len blinks and looks up and past Pavel, and he quirks an eyebrow as he sees Spock.

The Vulcan's standing against the wall by the door, arms stiff at his sides, impassive gaze on the bed.

Len peers out at him, and speaks to Pavel, quiet but loudly enough that Spock can hear. "How long's he been standing there?"

"A while," Pavel answers back in like kind. "He didn't speak when he came in, and so I think he is not waiting for me." He smiles, that small and private and not-quite-real smile he would flash so often in the cell, feigning a light heart. "He would like to speak to you alone, I am guessing, but he doesn't have an official-enough reason for it that he feels justified asking me to leave."

Len glances at Pavel, his smile going crooked.

Pavel meets his eyes for a moment, then relents. He slips his fingers from Len's hair and with a sigh sits back. "Very well then, for a while."

Len nods and watches him as he stands and moves towards the door. Too slow and deliberate, his steps, and when he doesn't so much as look directly at Spock as he walks past him, Len can tell it's not a good sign.

But it's too soon, still, to bother about the progress of recovery.

Spock moves into the room a few moments after Pavel has left.

Len pushes himself up, watching Spock as he approaches for some sign of what he's here for. They're...friends? Maybe. Though Len hasn't spent more than ten minutes with Spock at a time unless Jim was there with them. He likes Spock, when he doesn't hate him, but he doesn't figure they're the sort of pals who visit each other casually in sickbay.

And he doesn't put it past Jim to have sent Spock in his place to handle that whole ugly debriefing thing Jim was so reluctant to mention before.

Spock studies him for a moment, hands clasped behind his back. But he sits, suddenly and smoothly, in Jim's chair, and he doesn't look as if he's in a hurry to speak.

Len waits.

The words come finally, as Len figured they would - he didn't used to have the patience to wait, but he's got nothing but time on his hands now, and a man like Spock never makes a move without a plan in mind. He never would have come in just to sit and kill a few minutes.

"I would have stopped by sooner," Spock says when he finally speaks, "but duty called." His eyebrow quirks up the slightest bit.

Len's amused to interpret that eyebrow: 'duty' means he was babysitting the bridge while Jim indulged his dramatic side to waste away at Len's hospital bed. A fact that Spock seemed to find unsurprising, though his acceptance shows with a certain long-suffering quality.

"No sweat," Len says with a tired grin. "Not like I'm going anywhere in a hurry."

"Perhaps..." Spock trails off. He sits, stiff-spined, and regards Len for a moment.

"Your absence was distressing, Leonard."

Len blinks in surprise, trying not to feel too touched by that, at least until he knows what point Spock is building up to.

But Spock doesn't say anything else. He sits there in his chair and studies Len, and doesn't amend or revise or add conditions to his last words. As if he truly means simply that Len's absence was distressing.

Spock sits back after a moment, the normal straight-lined tension in his shoulders easing a little. He doesn't smile - of course, he never smiles - but his isn't tense, and he seems to be settled in where he is.

Len almost says something, but he eases back into the pillow and his grin fades. He isn't sure how long Pavel is going to give them before he comes back in, but somehow he doesn't feel quite so tense without him there.

His body seems to remember fast that he was sleeping pretty hard before the kid's singing woke him up, and his eyelids already feel heavy as he drops back against the pillow.

Hopefully Spock really is there simply to stand watch or hold vigil, because Len isn't gonna be much good for conversation for a while.

* * *

They watched him as they hurt him.

That's the thing Len can't keep out of his mind as he lays on the ground of that cell and aches, listening to snatches of Chekov's nervous voice.

They stood around him and watched him, and he doesn't know how to read Maalox faces but it didn't seem to be anything deeper than curiosity as they watched him. As they punched him with hammy, rough-skinned fists, burned his skin, hit him so hard that he felt his collarbone snap.

Curiosity. Like he wasn't a real person, a feeling creature. Like he was just one ingredient in some experiment. Even when he screamed, even when tears he couldn't stop ran down his face.

There are courses at Starfleet Academy strictly about torture. Classes in Medical about healing the effects, about the psychological scars and how to traige the damage on a body exposed to long-term torture. There were classes in the officer-training curriculum regarding how to withstand it, how to keep your mouth shut.

None of those classes addressed a very simple issue: how to deal with becoming utterly inhuman.

How does he deal with the memory of those impassive eyes, being surrounded by a crowd of sentient beings who saw him as subhuman, who saw his suffering as a mild curiosity and nothing more. How does he deal with that sort of pain? Feeling himself bent and twisted and burned until his own mind shut off, his own consciousness hid itself in self-protection.

How does he deal with knowing that he _became _subhuman, because being made to suffer that way forced his mind to retreat?

He has no idea, and he won't figure it out in this cage. Jim will be here anytime now, and Len's got to keep himself together until he can get back to the ship.

When he manages to draw himself out of his head, the kid, Chekov, is saying something rambling and thickly-accented about the food they brought into the cell while Len was gone.

"Kid."

Chekov cuts off fast, leaning in and studying his face from way too close. "Doctor?"

Jesus, the kid's already too young and too scared, and those eyes make him look like a cartoon. Len tries to smile but it feels more like a grimace.

The kid seems relieved at the sight of it, though, so maybe it comes out a little more sincere than it feels.

"Doctor," he says again, a sigh. "I have...I did what I could. I mean...they...you were bleeding, your arm. I can't do anything to...but I bandaged it. In a way."

Len looks down at his arm, awkward, but sees a thready strip of black fabric tied roughly around his upper arm.

His own black uniform undershirt is in tatters already, but he sees with a look at Chekov that the kid tore his own shirt instead of Len's, the bottom of the shirt jagged and missing a few inches at the hem.

Something about that, about the kid using his own shirt, yanking sturdy Starfleet-issued fabric with his own young hands, binding the most obviously bad of Len's wounds as Len lay there in a stupor...

Something about that makes Len relax. It makes him think maybe the dive into thoughtless subhumanity was really only temporary, that it doesn't have to mean anything now that it's over. One horrible memory, but nothing that will fasten itself to him to be dragged around like a fog wherever he goes from now on.

The kid..._Pavel_ looks at him like he's very much human, and very much a person worthy of concern. If Len didn't already have an inexplicable soft spot for the kid, it would be impossible to resist now.

So when Pavel looks at him with those innocent green eyes and asks, in a voice trying hard not to waiver, "Will they come for me next?" it's easy for Len to shake his head in answer.

"I'm the doctor," Len says, his voice rough. It's the truth, he knows it and it scares the shit out of him. "I'm the one who insulted their precious Empress." He lifts himself up, bracing his way to a sitting position with the nervous touch of a quick, slender hand to help him.

"It's me they hate," he finishes, and despite the trickle of ice-water-fear that shivers down his back, he says the words firmly.

He is the doctor. It was his decision to get self-righteous and refuse to waste his time, and the lives of people who can be saved, trying to save one person whose disease has all but run its course.

Pavel is a kid, an ensign, a bright-eyed science nerd with a funny accent who doesn't deserve what these pricks already put Len through.

Len has absolutely no choice but to try to keep the kid safe. And that comes from something stronger than enjoying the way the kid wear running shorts, or Pavel looking at him like a person and not a punching bag.

It's deeper than that. It's moral. It's something Len has never had a choice about, a code, a belief he's always lived by. It made him a doctor. It made him who he is in every other way.

He hurts right now like he's never hurt before, and he's going to live in fear of Jim not getting here before the aliens come back. But he feels strong somehow. Like he made the right choice.

Strange as it seems, he almost feels good about where he is.

* * *

"What reason?" Pavel asks, his voice soft, his accent thick, almost like remembering the cell makes him want to slip back into his hysterical Russian.

"Why make sure it was always you? You were the doctor, yes, but we were both doing the work. We were there together, doing the same research and wearing the same uniforms. It was your decision to refuse the work, but I supported it. We could have shared the punishment."

Len doesn't particularly want to talk about this. The only reason he started is because Jim's sitting there, looking at him with Official Captain Kirk eyes, recording his words. Debriefing.

Pavel is here because Len can't do it without him. The kid's been told a few times now to be quiet, to stop adding to Len's words. His own debriefing session is next.

But Jim doesn't speak up this time, and Pavel's words hang in the air, waiting to be addressed. Len hesitates, giving Jim a chance to say something. Anything, so Len can get on with the timeline and bypass the deeper issues.

A glance at Jim shows him that the Captain Kirk eyes have softened. Jim isn't speaking up because Jim wants to know the answer too.

Len swallows and looks back at Pavel. He settles back against the pillow, leaning against the headboard of his bed.

Looking at Pavel is a strange thing, even now. He had this niggle of attraction for the kid before this mission, yeah, but they didn't spend time together or anything like that. Pavel was stranger enough to him before the mission that what happened to them on the mission has become the only thing between them that matters.

Somewhere in his subconscious he remembers Pavel as the chirpy-voiced kid coming up with plans for intercepting rabid time-traveling Romulans. Way back in the back of his mind, Pavel is still _sewenteen. _

But that's so far back that it hardly rates. Len looks at Pavel now and sees his companion, his savior from despair. The quiet voice that talked him to sleep, the hand that bandaged his wounds and stroked his hair to soothe him. The lap that got his head off the stone floor as he tried to sleep. The boy that stood up, powerless, in front of their captors and fought.

Pavel is the one thing that keeps Len from giving up, sure that his hands are useless and his career is over. Pavel looked at him like he was human, worthy of concern, back in that cell, and he looks at Len now as if he's still the only thing in the universe worth protecting.

He looks at Pavel, and Jim and the recorder vanish. Though he doesn't want to talk about what or why anything happened on that planet, he can't deny the kid a request.

"_Primum non nocere." _He feels a little rusty, a little silly, speaking those words, but it's a valid answer.

Pavel's brow furrows, but not in confusion. "First no harm," he translates easily.

Len smiles faintly – no surprise the kid knows Latin. "People mistake it for part of the Hippocratic Oath, but it's older than that. It's the first, the most important, thing that you're taught when you study medicine. 'First, do no harm.' That's how it's usually translated."

Pavel nods.

Len shrugs. "For me, that wasn't ever good enough. It was so obvious it seemed silly. Of course do no harm. For me a truer translation would be 'let no harm be done'. By me or by anyone else. Not if I can prevent it."

Pavel smiles after a moment. "You have always been above everything an extremely moral man."

Len returns the smile. "It's gotten shaken up now and then, but yeah. For the most part." He reaches out.

Pavel leans in instantly, taking his bandaged hand carefully and brushing a feather-light stroke over his palm that feels like nothing but a whisper of pressure under the bandage.

Len regards his young, too-serious face. "So it isn't like I had a choice back there. Sitting back even once and letting you get dragged away in my place...that wasn't an option, and it never would have occurred to me. Allowing you to be hurt isn't an alternative to me being hurt, Pasha."

There's something in Pavel's eyes, something troubled, but he nods. His gaze lifts from Len's hand, and he smiles. It's frail and sad.

"I love you," he says softly.

It's as unsurprising as the first time he spoke those words. Len's stomach curls a little, his skin warms with a flush, and it's easy for his mouth to curl upwards in the face of those words, but beyond that it's like the kid's telling him that there's oxygen in the ship's atmosphere. It's such a given that it seems silly to state it out loud.

It's just as understood, just as obvious, that Len loves him back. He doesn't say it, and Pavel doesn't wait for it, doesn't need to hear it, and doesn't wilt or turn away when the words don't come. He knows it, Len is positive of that. He also knows that it's only his instinct for talking and Len's instinct for listening that makes him speak and Len stay silent.

Just because these are recently learned instincts created during imprisonment by an alien race doesn't make them any less valid.

It's only the sound of movement that reminds Len that Jim is sitting there against the wall by the foot of his bed. It's only Jim that reminds Len of the recorder sitting with him.

But it isn't the recorder that bothers Len as he looks over and Pavel recedes from being the only thing in his universe.

It's the look on Jim's face as he stares at both of them.

* * *

He sits on the hard stone floor, his arms wrapped around himself as if the cold hasn't seeped through his limbs. As if there's a single bit of warmth to generate.

He can't stop seeing McCoy's face.

They were given a few hours - Pavel had time to tell his own shortened version of a Russian Genius life, and the doctor even reciprocated a bit, speaking hoarse, quiet words about the American South and an extended family that seemed every bit as overbearing as Pavel's.

But the door opened again, and the Maalox brutes came in. They didn't hesitate this time, they didn't wait. They crossed the room, two of them as a third stood with his eyes and that strange squarish weapon trained on their captives, and they grabbed the doctor by his arms and simply hauled him up.

Pavel caught just a fleeting glimpse of his face as they turned him and hauled him back to the door, and now he can't get it out of his mind.

Doctor McCoy isn't a coward. Pavel knew that even before this mission. But there was fear in his eyes, dread, a pure kind that makes Pavel shiver even now when he just has the memory of it to face.

McCoy was stoic before that, talking about the south and the woman who became his wife, but Pavel knew then and knows now that he wasn't truly unaffected. He has no doubt that these creatures tortured him.

And now they have him again.

The scholar in Pavel doesn't understand it: they gain nothing by hurting the doctor. If they want to persuade him to help their Empress surely they must know that hurting him isn't the way to do it. And if the Empress is still sick what other motivation can they have?

If she has died...

Pavel has a hard time understanding revenge, at least this form of it. If their Empress has died they should simply kill their captives, shouldn't they? Doctor McCoy was right when they were first put into this miserable frigid little cell: no planet this small and this unadvanced should ever willingly pick a fight with the Federation.

They can gain nothing by this; they stand to lose their Empress along with sparking a war they simply can't win.

Unless they are confident that Doctor McCoy and Pavel will never be found.

Pavel has studied game theory, but for all his brilliance he's always considered himself rather unimaginative, and a good deal of the theory lies in imagining the different possible actions and each of their reactions. Still, it's a good way to occupy his time in the silence.

It's a good way to keep from wondering what's happening to McCoy.

So he lets his mind branch out. He can practically see the chart, the branches of the trees as he maps out their captors possible motivations.

When that proves to be too grim (it's backwards game theory, back-tracing actions to discover motivations), he turns it on himself. Possible actions, then possible results, then possible reactions.

They could fight, but the way the theory branches from there he is sure that they'll only be killed. They could cooperate, assuming the aliens are even making demands of McCoy, but though the results and reactions to those threads of possibility seem more hopeful, there are psychological shadows that don't show as much, but that he can't ignore. Of course they can't cooperate. McCoy reminded him of as much when they first angered the Maalox so badly.

They could do nothing, but that is a stunted and short tree to branch out possibilities from. They would simply be giving up their fates to a crowd of sadistic aliens who have already proven that they will willingly hurt their prisoners.

They could escape.

That possible action branches out a dozen different ways, and it's not as immediately depressing as the other options. There are possibilities there that don't result in death, in defeat, in moral or psychological destruction.

So that's what they must do. Escape.

McCoy has faith in Kirk. Pavel does too. But there is nothing to be gained by waiting for diplomacy. These aliens have hurt McCoy - they won't simply turn his injured body over to Kirk and wait to be punished for their crime. They hurt McCoy because they don't expect their actions to be discovered.

The key to their escape lies in that. Pavel's instinct is singing to him, though it's an unclear song. What the key is he doesn't know, but at least he knows what to focus on.

It distracts him through the silence, occupies his mind, keeps him from aiming his limited imagination towards McCoy.

But his silence is disturbed finally, and he's both relieved and instantly terrified when the cell door opens with its grinding, bone-deep metal whine.

It's so much like the first time that it feels like deja-vu. The aliens stride in with Doctor McCoy limp between them, and they simply let him go and watch him drop in a heap.

Pavel is instantly stone-cold, instantly twitching to go to the doctor, but he watches the aliens, hardly able to breathe as they turn their backs and move back to the door.

His eyes are on McCoy as the door squeals closed, and he pushes off the wall and crawls over to the doctor the moment the door is shut.

His throat wants to close. His already cold skin goes clammy, and he doesn't understand this.

It makes no sense. The blood, the re-opened wound on his arm, the fresh marks across his face. There is a patch of skin near his shoulder, under his collarbone, that he thinks is simply black with dirt until he leans closer and can actually smell the carbon of seared flesh.

There's no pattern to it. His shoes have been removed, his uniform is a laughable net of fabric strips barely hanging on, and Pavel can see no pattern in his injuries.

It's like they're experimenting with him, testing different methods to see what's effective.

It makes no _sense_. These are cold, terse, unfriendly creatures, yes, but how can they possibly be able to convince themselves that doing this to a helpless man is okay?

He reaches out unsteady hands, opens his mouth to call to the doctor.

The words don't come. He lets his fingertips skim McCoy's limp arm just under the deep cut he had bandaged earlier, and he sits back on his heels and tries to blink the heat out of his eyes.

This isn't right. Pavel, who has always had a good sense of human nature and the universal patterns to the behavior of sentient beings, simply can't make himself understand it. That they can do this to a man...

That they can do this to Doctor McCoy, who has only ever argued for morality and fairness...

Pavel draws in a deep breath and leans back in over the doctor. He reaches for the torn hem of his own shirt as he searches McCoy's injuries to see which needs most to be bandaged this time.

* * *

There is a silent, broad shadow leaning against the wall as Pavel emerges from sickbay. For a moment he is almost alarmed, but the red of the shadow's uniform is easy to see in the dim third-shift lights.

Security, a lieutenant. Standing there, leaning as if he's waiting for something.

Waiting for Kirk, perhaps. The captain is in with Len - again - which is the only reason Pavel has talked himself into leaving for a while. This security guard and Kirk have always, Pavel seems to remember, had some sort of issue with each other.

Whatever it is he's standing there waiting on, he doesn't move when Pavel comes out. He looks over at him, but doesn't move from the wall.

Pavel eyes him warily for a moment, but turns fast and heads down the corridor.

The instant before he's faced away it seems to him like the security guard opens his mouth to speak. But Pavel doesn't know the man and doesn't have time to waste. He has to get back to Len, which means not stalling this trip.

The guard is out of his thoughts when he arrives at the door he's seeking. Pavel hesitates there, but just for a few moments. He reaches out and presses the chime to request entrance.

After only a few seconds the door slides open, and the warm air inside drifts out at Pavel.

He steps in, drawn by the warmth. It's one thing that has come from being stuck in a frigid room for so long - he can't get warm enough now.

"Ensign Chekov."

Spock almost sounds surprised. He looks as impassive as always, of course, sitting cross-legged on a thin mat on the floor near the back of his sparsely furnished front room.

Meditating, perhaps. Pavel can't bring himself to apologize for interrupting.

"Commander," he says, strangely aware of the hoarse rasp in his voice that wasn't there before Maalox.

Spock looks up at him, patient. "I take it there is no emergency."

"No, sir." Pavel shrugs. "The captain is in with Len."

Spock's hands seem to settle against his knees, but he doesn't relax any further. The straight-spined way he's sitting seems fitting for him, though, comfortable.

"He asked you to leave?" he asks. "Or did you ask yourself to leave for him, the way you did when I arrived the other day?"

Pavel smiles at that, but it's hard to do. Surprising, given that he's felt comfortable smiling since the moment he woke up on the ship.

"No one asked me to leave," he answers simply. "But I was hoping to talk to you, and I don't like to leave Len alone. I know Kirk will stay until I get back."

Spock's eyebrow arches, but he doesn't respond. He gestures to the mat spread out in front of him.

Pavel moves in, accepting the silent invitation. He sits, folding his legs under him easily. It's not the first time he's sat on this mat in this warm room.

He has always had a great deal of respect for Spock. Even before being assigned to the Enterprise he knew of the designer of the infamous_ Kobayashi Maru_, the half-Vulcan Starfleet officer. The part of Pavel that is uncomfortable with smirking informality breathes easier in the presence of the only other officer who seems to dislike it. The student in him craves learning, and Spock has always been an ideal teacher.

He understands Spock, he likes to think, in a way that many don't. Perhaps because his childhood was almost as alienated, or because he has always put the love of knowledge above most everything else, especially the tedious things a teenager is apparently supposed to care about.

In a more selfish way he enjoys Spock because he and Scotty are usually the only ones who appreciate how much lies behind Pavel's ideas. There have been several times in the first year of their mission when Pavel's theories and plans have saved the ship. Saved whole planets. Kirk accepts those theories casually - he expects nothing less than universe-saving brilliance from all his officers - and most others are simply impressed that he's capable (surprised every single time, as if they instantly forget every time before it), that a child his age can think up solutions that baffle the adults around him.

Scotty understands the technical side, the hard sciences that Pavel can turn on their sides to bend towards alternate result. Spock has the background to understand all the layers of practical and theoretical physics that lie behind Pavel's ideas. Scotty is mathematical logic against Spock's formal logic, and the little boy inside Pavel who wants to show off his skills appreciates both of them for that.

But it's that same aspect, the faith in Spock's knowledge and understanding, that has Pavel sitting on the mat in his quarters, disturbing his rest.

He always liked to seem confident in front of Spock, but he has no conscious idea of how to ask what he's wanting to know and it bothers him now less than it would have before Maalox.

"What's the saying that you've quoted to the captain during a few of our missions? 'The good of the many...'"

Spock corrects easily. "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. It is not mine, of course, it is an old idea. Aristotle, I believe, was the first human to state that the meeting of individual needs is not so noble as the securing the good of the state."

Pavel nods. He's not unfamiliar with the principle behind the words, of course. Even had he not grown up in a Russia that still limped under the weight of its Communist history, he has read enough philosophy and political theory to understand it.

But he has always preferred Spock's phrasing of the idea.

Spock regards him, and speaks when Pavel doesn't. "As I recall that is one of Doctor McCoy's least favorite of my arguments."

Pavel smiles at that. "Len doesn't see justice in terms of numbers. The most helpless should be protected, the most injured should be healed, no matter how many other people are affected." He hesitates. "The only time I have ever seen Len choose not to help someone who was dying, it was the Empress of the Maalox."

Spock speaks slowly, as if he's trying to guess at what has Pavel here on his floor. "Are you unable to understand, or condone, the doctor's actions? Do you see him as being at fault for how the mission unfolded?"

"No."

Pavel looks at his yellowed fingernails. Iron deficiency has caused that, along with yellowing the skin around his eyes, making him look more sick and gaunt than he is. It will go away, M'Benga told him. He just has to eat regular meals.

He sighs and stops letting his mind distract him. He fists his hands and lays them on his thighs and looks up towards Spock, if not at him.

"I understand why Len chose as he did. He told them that the Empress was too far gone to help, and perhaps he could have lied and kept working with the flawed samples we were being brought. But she would have died, and our work could not progress either way. In the end I think Len couldn't bear being so close to death and knowing his work wasn't helping. And he couldn't even pretend to want to help the sort of leader who would allow her people to die so that her own life could be saved first."

Spock nods.

"I understand," Pavel says slowly, "why he couldn't go on, and why he couldn't even act like he was going along with their orders. As horrid as they were, I can even understand having such devotion to a leader that her life is the only thing that matters."

"Then what do you not understand?" Spock asks.

Pavel draws his arms up around his chest - he's so easily chilled lately. "They never even asked him to reconsider."

Spock tilts his head, studying Pavel. "Your captors."

"He told me...even when they hurt him, they weren't looking for his cooperation. Once they...they hurt his hands so badly...they were insuring they would never get it. I don't understand why the idea of...revenge, or anger, or hatred, was so strong in these creatures that it outweighed the needs of the many, or the needs of the one. They are still dying on that planet, their Empress is dead, and they have painted a target on themselves. For what?"

Spock is silent for a moment, steepling his long fingers and gazing out at Pavel thoughtfully. "Nyota was the first to suspect that something might go wrong on that planet. Even before you failed to check in on schedule, she feared the Maalox. Her concern was based in their language."

Pavel can hear it too easily, the rapid-fire staccato words, the way they spoke as if they were biting each word off so that the next could come faster. Even through the translators their English could sound just as clipped.

"They have numerous words that seem to translate to 'pain' or 'hurt', much the same as Inuit cultures on Earth have many words for snow, or the Ferengi have a thousand words for money. She is not familiar enough with the idiosyncrasies of the language to find the subtle differences, but a culture's language reveals details about that culture in very meaningful ways."

Spock seems to relax some, his shoulders releasing some of their stiffness. "Inuit societies have thrived or perished under the fall of snow. Ferengi consider greed to be the most noble of traits."

Pavel nods - he hasn't ever studied linguistics such as they are, but these are things any student of culture and society has been taught.

Spock goes on. "Nyota tells me that the Maalox have a word in their language that means, as best as she can decipher it, 'to dole out punishment in equal measure but unlike kind.'"

Pavel considers that translation. "Then you believe they reacted to a grave insult, an injury of pride, by what they felt was equal punishment?"

"It would appear so. And, were that the case, they would hardly be revolutionary in thinking so. Most cultures don't have a specific word for the idea - revenge itself is common, but the allowance of a physical revenge to satisfy an injury of pride doesn't seem to be a concept most peoples would embrace. Still, there are examples of such things through history, on most any planet you choose to study."

"Maybe that's what I can't reconcile," Pavel says softly, more to himself than to Spock. "I'm not a stranger to the nature of sentient beings - I know that most people who do evil things do them thinking that they are right. Very few individuals consider themselves to be truly evil, and no entire society does. They are able to justify evil actions, and it's that justification that I don't understand."

"You understand it," Spock says, his impassive eyes steady on Pavel. Free of judgment, the way he always seems to be. "You simply can't accept it."

Which, yes, is more accurate. Pavel nods his acceptance.

"If an entire race of beings," he says slowly, "can justify the sort of torture they put Len through, and feel themselves right for doing it, than it seems likely that any one of us could convince ourselves to commit acts of similar evil in the name of whatever we feel is important."

And if that's the case, than no one is safe. Every single person of any race, any species, is potentially fatally dangerous.

Is it such a revelation? Pavel has always known people who were capable of cruelty. He has known good people who have been pushed too far. The man across from him on this floor nearly murdered a man with his bare hands to avenge simple taunting.

Pavel himself would have skinned those Maalox bastards alive if he could have. He wasn't physically capable of hurting them, but in his mind there isn't a single doubt that he would have.

Perhaps it's that that bothers him most, that sent him in search of quiet words with a logical man who wouldn't console or judge him for whatever he ended up admitting.

Perhaps it's the reason that Leonard McCoy is the only person Pavel feels truly safe with. Because most people can use any rationale to justify any cruelty, but not Len. Len is the one person Pavel has ever met who would die sooner than kill someone else.

Len is the exception that proves the rule. He is healer, and everyone else, even Pavel, is reprehensible in comparison.

"Ensign."

Pavel looks up, focusing his distant gaze on Spock.

Spock seems curious, searching his face, but when he speaks it's a simple statement. "Any of us could convince ourselves to do evil in the name of our own interests, that's true. But consider: we rarely do. In the end, that should be what matters."


	6. Chapter 6

"Then it was your idea?"

Len almost laughs at the shock on the kid's face. He manages a hoarse sort of chuckle, but it makes his throat burn and he silences it with a grimace.

There's no comfortable way to lay on this floor, and somehow he doesn't feel self-conscious about the kid pulling him in close, letting his lap be a pillow to get him off the hard stone ground. Even if it means he's chuckling at a shocked face looking directly down at him.

"...were living in different cities," he says. "She didn't want to leave Atlanta. Figured if she stayed there it'd wear me down and I'd go back to the fancier set-up at the hospital. So I was on my own in this apartment in Macon, living like a bachelor anyway. When she decided I should start calling ahead of time to schedule my visits, even to see Joanna...yeah. I pulled the plug."

"She was too much a coward to make the choice herself," Pavel says, firm, as if he's known Jocelyn for years.

Len almost chuckles again. Not at the kid's presumption, but because it's something he's always figured was true.

"...marriage was over before it started," he murmurs, wincing at a sudden sharp throb down near his pelvis. One of them planted a boot in his gut and the pain flares up at seemingly random times.

"Having Jo postponed things, for a long time. But I wasn't surprised when she refused to move to Macon with me. And she...she _acted_ surprised when I asked her for a separation, but she wasn't." He manages a watery chuckle finally. "That woman fucking loved to play martyr."

"Then...why..." The kid's brow creases.

Never quiet, this kid's brain. Len smiles absently and lets his eyes close, relaxing back against knobby knees and warm lap.

"Why give everyone the idea that she was what drove you into Starfleet? What _did _drive you there?"

"Jo," Len answers, a mumble. He might actually fall asleep this way, if Pavel shuts up with the questions.

"Your daughter?"

"Mmm. Couldn't do it. Couldn't live so close to her. It was like..." He smirks, small and bitter. "Torture."

"I don't..." Pavel falls quiet.

Len's never told anyone in his new life about this part of his old life, and there are reasons. The biggest reason is that he wants to put it behind him. But there's also a part of him that holds on to it because no one else will ever understand it. Especially not these childless babies he serves with.

"Thought about moving," he says, eyes still shut. "But everywhere you go the streets are full of transport stations, shuttles. Thousand ways to be back with her in a minute's time, from anywhere on earth. Bu...Joce won her. Joce got the papers that said she owned our kid, and I couldn't deal with being so close to her knowing I couldn't ever make the trip."

Pavel is quiet for a while, and Len lets his thoughts get slower and heavier.

He's already heard about Pavel's family, his dead mother and distant father. He knows that Pavel doesn't miss anyone back on earth, not enough that he'd understand Len and his issues with his kid.

The idea pushes his eyes open, just slitted enough that he can see the outline of Pavel's chin over his head. "Kid."

Pavel looks down instantly.

Len squints up at him. "You ever loved anybody?"

Pavel doesn't answer right away, but suddenly there's red spreading over his face and it makes Len chuckle again.

"That a yes?"

Pavel sighs and tries to look annoyed, but he ends up looking down at Len and smiling almost shyly. "I don't-"

There's a hard thump, somewhere beyond this little patch of warm lap, and then a sudden metallic grinding squeal.

Len's grin vanishes and his stomach seizes. "No," he says, an instant reaction even if the word's barely a mumble.

Pavel's hand, laying on Len's shoulder, tightens for a moment, and the blush has vanished under sickly pale. He looks down at Len. "I will go."

Len's throat wants to close. He shakes his head, but more in dread than in response to the kid's words.

No. Jesus, they just brought him back. Couldn't have been two hours ago. He's still bleeding, he can feel it running in a warm track down his arm. He can't do this again. They've taken him back there twice now, how much more do they expect him to take?

He sucks in a breath and forces his eyes open, and when he sees impassive gray figures over him he groans. Better than a sob, but there's no denying the weakness in it.

"I will go this time."

It's those words that silence the shivering fear in Len's head. He can feel Pavel shifting under him, and he thinks the kid is serious.

He forces himself to move, his gut screaming, his body heavy and slow. He glares up at the Maalox and pushes himself to sit up.

"Think I'm scared of them?" he rasps out, and fear makes the words shake but maybe they won't hear that in his alien voice. Hopefully they'll understand the hate in his eyes easier than the tremble in his voice.

"Doctor, let me-"

He shoves back at the cool hand that tries to grab his arm. "Back off, kid. They want me, they'll get me."

When broad-fingered alien hands reach to pull him up from the floor he wants to collapse back, to change his mind. But through his fear he's still him - he knows that the only thing worse than what's happening would be if it was happening to Pavel while he sat by and allowed it.

"Wait. Doctor..."

He glanced back as they haul him towards the door, and tries to focus on Pavel's face. The kid's getting to his feet, tense, and Len speaks fast to distract him long enough to keep him from doing something dumb.

"Do me a favor, kid." One of the guards barks something at him, but he ignores it. "Forget the 'doctor' crap, huh? Seems like the kinda situation that allows for first names."

Pavel hesitates, and Len can't focus on his face but if nothing else the words keep the kid still long enough for the door to squeal shut on him.

* * *

His skin is pink. The unnatural soft, line-less pink of brand new skin covers his fingers, his palms, the back of his hands, tracing down to weave into the darker skin of his arms.

He knows M'Benga basically had to build him new hands out of the shattered remains of his old ones, but seeing this unnatural pinkish skin brings it home in a jarring way.

Len hasn't wanted to look at his hands since before they were even recovered, but now he can't stop staring. He turns them around, front and back, right and left, again and again. He watches the shivering muscles and twitching in his fingers impassively as he looks for all the things that are still wrong.

His wrists, M'Benga explains even as he unwraps the bandages. The bones there are too numerous, too delicate, and too destroyed, and he had to save a lot of the work until Len's body was recovered enough to handle it.

Maybe that's why everything from his wrists up is shaking so badly. Maybe it will just take this course of reconstructive surgery and then he'll be good as new.

Unfortunately Len's not an idiot. He can't buy into that.

The skin is all smooth, well-shaped. Two hands built by a skillful surgeon. No hangnails, no chewed down fingernails, no signs of use at all. He used to have this little inch-long scar on the back of his left hand, a cut from a piece of glass when he was maybe eighteen. It's gone.

The fingers look like fingers, at least, not like the flattened mess they must have been when he first came back to the ship. Distantly he recognizes the work M'Benga has already put in, the hours of delicate surgeries it would have taken to get him even this far.

He isn't ungrateful, but he can't see anything right now except pink skin and shivering muscles.

"Leonard."

He draws his eyes up, remembering that the man himself is right there, still holding the last bits of bandage that has been sliced away to reveal this.

Jabilo M'Benga. He's a fucking good doctor, Len can see it in his eyes even if the evidence wasn't all over his hands. If a single good thing came out of the destruction of Vulcan, it was him.

M'Benga was a specialist in Vulcan physiology, working on a Vulcan colony back when Vulcan itself was demolished. A good many Vulcan colonies relocated to New Vulcan when the few survivors of the planet's destruction settled there. There were so few of them that an outsider, a human with a specialty in Vulcan physiology, became redundant.

M'Benga accepted that with the stoicism of a true Vulcan, and his search for a new assignment brought him to Len's attention. Len figured it'd be a good idea to have one of the few Vulcan experts in Starfleet on his ship, since they have one of the few Vulcan officers on board. Besides, the man's record spoke for itself.

His years of working with Vulcans have given M'Benga an impassive air. He is used to delivering good and bad news to unemotional listeners who simply want the facts as straightforwardly as possible. It's given him an air of constant calmness which, in Leonard McCoy's sickbay, is a valuable commodity.

Still, there's compassion in his eyes as he looks at Len: Len won't let a single doctor or nurse work for him without that compassion inside of them.

Doesn't make him feel much better that it's aimed at him now, but he draws in a long breath and tries to absorb some of M'Benga's calmness.

"We've already talked about the work that we know needs to be done," M'Benga says, steady and even in his low, rich voice. "Now we need to check on the uncertainties."

Len doesn't answer. He stretches out his hands.

A thorough but mercifully quick prick test reveals the problems, the numb patches, the indicators of nerve damage. His left hand worse than his right, which is a pathetically small mercy.

M'Benga doesn't bother pointing out what they find, since Len is diagnosing himself as they go anyway. Nerve damage is tricky bitch - there are surgical repairs, courses of therapy, but like so much about the human body there's no way to predict how much the nerves will recover. Len has overseen the reattachment of completely severed limbs and had all the nerves respond so well that a week after attachment there isn't a single indication that there was ever a problem. He's also seen officers suffer ticks of nerves from the smallest injuries that refuse to heal, that end careers.

In the end M'Benga sits back and nods, as if they've done all the diagnosing out loud.

"We can add the nerve repair to our list tomorrow, after the reconstructive bone surgery. It'll keep us there another two hours or so, but if we get them both done together we can jump into therapy as soon as possible. I don't want to sidetrack one recovery with a second surgery if we can avoid it."

Len nods, though the word 'recovery' seems so fucking distant right then it's like a joke. Still, it's the same thing he'd've done, handling it all in one go.

"My bill's gonna be ridiculous," he grumbles, some half-assed attempt to find some kind of humor in any of this.

M'Benga doesn't crack a smile. He nods at Len's shaking pink hands. "It would be safer to bandage your wrists again until tomorrow, but I'll let you make the choice."

"Do it," Len says before he can even think about it. He hates the strange heavy feeling of the bandages, but he's already at the bottom of a fucking steep hill here and he's not going to endanger his recovery any more than fate already has.

M'Benga puts on a thinner layer of bandages. No small talk, no covering up Len's fears with chit-chat - another thing to appreciate about M'Benga. He simply sprays the bandages with sterile sealant and walks him back to his bed, gives his shoulder a single supportive squeeze before he leaves.

Pavel sits on Len's bed when Len moves through the door. They haven't officially re-admitted the kid, at least they haven't moved a second bed back in here, but he's always here anyway.

Len can't smile at him, can't say anything. He walks to his bed and sits, heavy. He stares down at his hands, and he can see the slightest tremble now that the thinner bandages can't conceal.

Pavel shifts behind him, moving across the narrow mattress to press up against his back.

Len leans back against him. "My hands are my entire life," he says, and he didn't feel it coming up but his voice is thick and shaking as he talks.

He never asked M'Benga what kind of odds he had, because he knew M'Benga would tell him the truth. Len's seen too many lives ruined, too many careers shot, over lesser injuries than this.

He isn't dying; it's somehow worse. He'll come out of tomorrow's surgery as healthy as he is today, but tomorrow he'll know if he's a doctor or not.

He'd rather it was his life in jeopardy than his job. And Jesus, how fucking ungrateful does that make him?

He breathes in and his throat catches. Behind him, warm and close, Pavel holds on to him.

After a second shuddering breath hitches into a sob, Pavel's voice floats quietly into his ear. That same soft Russian song he's sung to Len before.

_"Bayu-bayushki-bayu/Ne lozhisya na krayu/Pridyot serenkiy volchok..."_

* * *

"They brought food while you were out," Pavel says, when the glaze is mostly gone from McCoy's eyes and it looks as if he can focus on things.

He reaches over McCoy to where the thin platter sits. The mess on there seems like some kind of vegetable, green and leafy but cooked into a soggy lump. It doesn't smell horrible, anyway.

Pavel hasn't had an appetite, but with the doctor back and safe in his lap his stomach gives a feeble growl as he brings the food closer.

He ignores it for the moment - McCoy needs it more than he does. He leaves the platter on the floor beside him and looks down at McCoy uncertainly.

"Do you think you can sit up, doctor?"

McCoy grimaces, muttering something.

"Sorry, doctor, I didn't..."

"I said," McCoy gets out more slowly, speaking through gritted teeth, "stop with the doctor."

Pavel frowns, confused, but a moment later remembers what McCoy said as the aliens took him out of the cell.

He tries to smile. "Of course. Leonard. Do you think you can sit up?"

The doctor's shoulders and head lift up from Pavel's lap, his hands slipping to the stone floor to brace himself, but he can't get very far at all.

Pavel ends up sliding out from under him and helping him, bracing his back until he ends up sitting as Pavel was before, leaning against the wall.

McCoy is pale with eyes shut tight by the time they've got him up, but he doesn't say anything. He sags against the wall.

A thousand questions are on Pavel's lips - what are they doing to him? Why do they keep this going? Are they asking him for information, demanding that he save their Empress? What is behind this seemingly mindless violence?

But of course he doesn't ask. He draws in a breath and hears himself speaking, as he has often the last few days, about unimportant things.

"I'm not sure what this is," he says as he reaches for the platter and sets it on McCoy's lap. "Steamed vegetable of some kind. I'm sure it's cold by now, but I doubt that'll make it taste much worse."

McCoy pries his eyes open and looks down at the platter. He snorts softly. "Looks like collards. My mom'd be happy."

"Collards?" Pavel asks, but keeps going again quickly before McCoy stalls his meal to try to answer him. "Spinach I am familiar with, of course, and that was my first thought. Of course we're more prone to cabbage where I'm from..."

McCoy reaches for the pile of soggy greens and pulls a small leaf from the top. He eyes it warily, but lifts it to his mouth and eats.

Pavel sits back, relaxing a little. "…so maybe it's in my heritage to be suspicious of any vegetable so...dark. But of course vegetation on most any planet is going to be a good source of nutrition, at least assuming they don't intend to poison us with something inedible."

McCoy swallows, makes a face at the platter. He sighs, though, and reaches for another couple of leaves.

Pavel sits back, content by that, and wraps his arms around his knees as he watches the doctor eat. "It doesn't do much good to think about it, I know, but I can practically taste my grandmother's cabbage and potato piroshki. Fresh sour cream, hot tea to wash it down..."

He trails off, since it really doesn't do any good to think about it and he's only making himself hungrier.

He watches McCoy carefully until half the heap of green is gone. It's slow, but no doubt the doctor's more aware than Pavel is about how important it is to keep up any kind of strength.

He doesn't speak until McCoy starts slowing down, hesitating after every swallow. "Doctor..."

McCoy looks at him.

Pavel nearly blushes. "Leonard. Sorry."

"Len," McCoy says, and his voice sounds a little stronger so maybe the vegetables are even better for him than Pavel thought. "Leonard's for when I'm in trouble."

Pavel nudges the plate. "You're not finished, Leonard."

McCoy - Len - rolls his eyes. "Christ, you _are _my mom."

Pavel smiles faintly but sits back and watches him silently.

Len takes another bite, chewing the leaf with barely-concealed dislike. "So," he says after he swallows, dropping his head back against the wall. "What is it?"

Pavel doesn't bother faking confusion about the question. He draws his knees up to his chest and circles his arms around his legs.

"They will be back."

Len's throat works and his eyes jerk towards the door. His fear would be obvious even if he was trying to hide it.

Pavel has to pause before going on. "You should have let me go last time."

Len looks back at him fast. "This seem like a lot of fun to you?" He jerks an arm out, gesturing at his ragged, bloody clothes and limp body.

Pavel doesn't rise to the bait - it's too easy a distraction from his point. "There's no reason for you to take this all on yourself. I am an officer just as you are."

Len snorts. His eyes shut even as his hand gestures out towards Pavel. "Look at you. You're a kid, not..." He trails off, hand dropping to the ground beside him.

"A kid, not...what?" he asks, his voice strange even to his own ears.

Pavel has been wired tight for days now, trapped in this stone cell, helpless as they take McCoy away and bring him back in worse and worse shape. He's tried to patch him up as best he can, he's sat for hours in silence, fearing the unknown, fearing the Maalox hauling back a corpse. He is aching from cold and tension, fear has cut his stomach into ribbons, and hunger is becoming difficult to ignore.

The last thing he worries about here and now, when he has a thousand very real, very distinct things to fear, is the idea that he might not be taken seriously. That's an old fear, a silly childish fear. A fear that he settled in his own mind, as far as the Enterprise is concerned at least, during their very first mission.

There are a hundred reasons why he shouldn't react to Len's words. But for all those reasons, this is the one fear he can actually fight back against.

"Not an officer? My uniform disproves that, Doctor."

"C'mon, kid, gimme a break." The words are low, a groan.

But Pavel can't bring himself to feel guilty. "I am an officer, and I will serve out this assignment as an officer. I'm not here to be your ward, to be babysat and protected. I will go with these creatures the next time they come in, and I will take my share of-"

"Jesus, Pavel, _look _at you."

Anger flashes over Pavel at still being ignored, but for a moment he hesitates. For a moment he looks down at himself, at his arms wrapped so tightly around his knees, drawn tight up to his chest.

Perhaps he does seem young at that moment. Leonard must see nothing but his eyes and curls and this position he's in, and it must seem young to him.

He doesn't care. Len can see whatever he wants, the measure of a man doesn't lie in the way his hair curls or how he chooses to sit to ward off the constant creep of cold.

"Look at me," he answers back. "Is your objection that I look young or that I am young?"

"You're seventeen fucking years old, you shouldn't even be—"

"I'm _eighteen_," Pavel snaps from his tight curl. "If you must judge me for my age, you ought to judge me at least by the one year of it you are remotely familiar with. I was seventeen when we met, and between then and now I have been an officer of Starfleet. I have saved lives and caused lives to be lost. I have pressed the command to fire the phasers that have killed others. I have saved planets, saved officers. I have lived and breathed this job and this uniform, and how dare you not even give me credit for this one year?"

Len's eyes are open by then. He looks out at Pavel, something lost and pained behind his gaze.

Pavel faced him steadily. "Do you think that when someone I meet now learns that I'm eighteen, they would ever imagine the sort of things that I have done? Or will they simply hear the number, eighteen, and decide for themselves what it means? Tell me, doctor, even when we first met, when I was still seventeen, what did you know about any of those seventeen years? How do you know how much living I had actually done? How could you ever know what 'seventeen' means for me?"

McCoy looks away from him, head dropping back against the wall, eyes squeezing shut again.

Pavel cracks fast. Maybe this anger is the one choking emotion he has any kind of outlet for, but he isn't deluded enough to think that expressing this childish old anger is going to help at all.

He unfolds himself from his tight curl, getting to his feet awkwardly and moving back over to Len.

He crouches down, taking the plate from Len's lap. He fishes a piece of green from the plate and regards it for a moment.

Len's eyes are open again when Pavel looks over. Pavel flashes a faint, sheepish smile and holds the leaf out.

"You haven't finished."

The doctor ignores the food. "Look. Pavel." He sounds so exhausted that Pavel's stomach churns.

"No. Doc...Len. Please. I shouldn't have said anything. Please eat."

Len sighs, but reaches for the offered leaf. "Really has been a hell of a first year, hasn't it?"

The words make Pavel smile. "It has, yes. And now I can add 'captured and imprisoned' to my list next time I decide to give that particular self-righteous speech." Pavel relaxes a little when Len actually eats the leaf, as if it's a peace offering that's been accepted. "I will probably not add 'yelled at an injured superior officer', though. It doesn't really support the point I'm trying to make."

Len chuckles quietly as he swallows the leaf. "You made your point, don't worry about that." He still seems exhausted and unsteady, but there's light in his eyes. "I sure as hell don't see you the way I did before this assignment."

"Do you want anymore?" Pavel pushes the plate away when Len shakes his head. There are a few leaves left but he'll worry about them later.

He slips in beside Len, sitting against the wall close to where he had been before the meal. "Should I even ask how you used to see me?" He crosses his legs back into pillow form and send Len an almost sheepish sort of look.

Len lets out a breath but doesn't hesitate. He slips down from his sagging position, curling in and letting Pavel ease him down until he is laying once again with his head in Pavel's lap.

"Something tells me if I answer that it'll just piss you off again."

Pavel makes a soft sound, amusement and agreement all in one, and lets his hand rest on Len's arm. "Then I won't ask. Perhaps instead you can tell me about this thing you called yourself, this 'sawbones'. What does it mean?"

And nothing's really changed, he realizes as Len shuts his eyes and leans into Pavel and talks quietly in his rough, abused voice. Nothing is settled upon. Len has no intention of letting Pavel go with the Maalox next time they come in, and Pavel has no intention of being left behind again.

But he listens to Len talk about medicine, about outdated equipment and his rejection of modern automated diagnoses and treatments, and he thinks they won't be able to run from the issue for very long at all.

* * *

"The kid _loves _him."

Hikaru blinks as Jim pushes through his still-opening doorway and marches right past him into his quarters. He steps back and lets the door slide shut again, and after just a moment's thought he reaches back and activates the lock.

Jim's looking a little wild, which isn't a great sign. He's been wild for over a month now, of course, ever since the landing party failed to check in the very first time. But recovering the doctor and Pavel seemed to ease that wildness, tame it back just a little bit.

Now it's back.

Hikaru sighs and moves past Jim to the small replimat. "Two coffees," he says without bothering to ask Jim first. "One black, one extra sweet with cream."

The replimat hums and the cups appear in the small window.

Hikaru turns back to Jim with coffee in hand, and Jim simply reaches out and plucks a cup out of his hand when his pace takes him past.

Hikaru waits, sips the drink he's been left with. He holds it out silently when he tastes the grit of sugar, and without missing a beat Jim slaps the black coffee back into his hand and takes the other.

That sorted, Hikaru moves to his small sofa to watch Jim. This pacing, the taste of bitter coffee too late in the evening, the proclamations that Jim doesn't ever feel the need to elaborate on until asked, they're strangely familiar after the last month.

Sometimes he stays silent and waits for Jim's pacing steps to slow down before trying to get more out of him, but this isn't just about Jim Kirk's worries. Hikaru has spent hours over the last few days with a smiling, blank-eyed stranger who claims to be his best friend. He has no patience for waiting when the problem is obviously about Pavel.

"I assume you're talking about McCoy?" he says quietly.

"No, I'm talking about Spock. Of i_course/i _McCoy. 'I love you', simple as that, right in Bones' ear. And he didn't...nothing! I mean...like it's not the most fucked up thing that kid could possibly have said at that moment."

Hikaru raises his eyebrows. He holds his warming cup between his palms. "I could think of a few things that might qualify as more fucked-up."

Jim glares over at him, but his steps slow. He swerves closer and sets his coffee on the small table in front of the sofa, and though he keeps pacing it won't be long before he sits. His tempers have at least developed a rhythm in their frequency.

"You know what I mean. I've been hesitant enough already letting this weird codependent thing between them keep going the way it is. Chekov should be halfway back to bridge duty by now, and Bones should at the very least be able to sleep on his own. It's not normal, them hanging off each other this way, but hell. I let it go on. They've been through some shit, and the entire universe blames me for it, so who'm I to say no, right?"

"Jim."

Jim flashes a hard blue-eyed stare his way. "What?"

"Don't be a dick."

That stops his pacing. "Excuse me?"

Hikaru sighs, patient. "Don't make this about you." When Jim just scowls harder he holds up a hand. "Whatever Pavel said wasn't because you chose to follow orders and offer assistance to an unfriendly but not combatant planet. It wasn't because you chose to fulfill Pavel's annoyingly-frequently-voiced wish to join an away mission. It wasn't because you accepted Starfleet's suggestion to take a side mission nearby and leave the two of them on that planet. Those are your own issues to deal with, don't pile them on top of Pavel and McCoy's issues."

Jim makes a face, but when he moves again it's to come around the table and drop, heavy, on the couch beside Hikaru. He scowls out at the front room of his small quarters.

Hikaru regards him, the set jaw against the too-bright, worried eyes. Jim can be self-absorbed, but as captain he does have to accept a hell of a lot of responsibility for things going wrong with his crew and his actions.

That's led to what Hikaru considers his own chief duty in being Jim's sounding board the last few weeks - keeping the job separate from the man. He's Jim's friend, since their very first days on board together. They saved each other's lives before they were formally introduced, and that kind of thing sticks.

Hikaru met Jim on that drilling platform. He stuck his sword through the gut of a Romulan and plucked Jim off the side of the drill. He felt the blow of Jim's body plowing into him during freefall over Vulcan, and realized it only came because Jim launched himself off that drill to catch him as he fell.

Captain Kirk came later, and even the brilliant and honored and lauded-over _Kirk_ isn't powerful enough to smother Hikaru's closeness to _Jim._

Maybe Hikaru is out of line calling his captain a dick. But Jim wouldn't be there in his quarters unless he wanted to hear it.

Jim's there because he needs to be Jim. He needs to be a worried friend. Hikaru just has to shake the Captain Kirk out of him a little at the beginning to get down to the real issues.

Jim drops against the back of the couch, rubbing at his face. "Things are supposed to be getting less fucked up, Hikaru. Not more."

That's Jim talking, so Hikaru relaxes a little and sips his coffee. "I didn't realize you held love in such contempt."

Jim shoots him a look. "I've got nothing against love, I have something against a teenager a week outside of starving to death confessing his love to a guy he's been watching get tortured for the last few weeks. A guy who, I'll go ahead and add, has never given a second thought to that kid, but who didn't even seem surprised to hear those words."

Hikaru smiles faintly. "If McCoy had pushed him away or said 'ew, gross' you'd feel better about it all?"

"Look. If I can't be a dick neither can you."

"Fair enough."

"But yeah, I would." Jim blows out a sigh, reaching for his coffee cup again. "Because it's not like him. Bones is a hell of a guy, but he's a cynic about things like love. He can't say the word without derision. Anything else in the world he's got this optimistic streak a mile wide, even if most people don't see that part of him. But he's had his shot with love, so he says. He did the wife-and-kid thing and it ended up tearing him apart. He doesn't want it, he doesn't believe in it. He shouldn't have accepted the word from a kid he hardly knows. It's not natural."

Hikaru laughs softly, just a puff of air against the coffee cup.

Jim hears it, of course. He's gotten used to Hikaru and his subtle responses just as much as Hikaru is used to him and his bombast.

"What?"

"You're being obtuse in a few ways, and it's not helping you prove your point."

Jim glowers at him, but sighs after a moment and gestures in a graceless wave. "Go on, then."

"Jim. You're not an idiot. A guy who you know as an optimist with a knack for hiding it doesn't really want to grow old alone because of some woman he left behind years ago, and you know it."

Jim frowns at his coffee cup. "He makes a convincing argument," he grumbles.

Hikaru goes on without acknowledging those words. "Pavel is a naïve kid in a lot of ways, but I know him better than almost anyone. He knows himself in a way you just don't understand. This thing with McCoy isn't new."

Jim does look over at that, brow creasing.

"He's been fascinated by McCoy since the end of the very first mission. I took it as puppy love and teased him mercilessly over it. He was seventeen years old, he had a half a term at the Academy before being posted to the Enterprise, and before then he never left Russia. It's easy to think he's some clueless genius who has no sense about the real world, but that's not the Pavel I know." Hikaru can smile a little at the memory of it.

He wishes in an absurd way that he could tease Pavel now about getting a whole month alone with McCoy. He wishes so fucking badly that the mission had been so routine and boring that he could jump right back into sighing McCoy's name at Pavel like some addled child, trying to get a rise out of him.

He dismisses the thought - useless to wish, really. "If you think it's unlikely McCoy can really accept those words, I know it's just as unlikely that Pavel would say them. Not unless he had proof enough to support the hypothesis."

Jim rolls his eyes, but he seems to be listening. "I get it, the kid's a nerd. But you really don't think he's young enough to mistake whatever attachment issues he's got for Bones right now as something else?"

Hikaru smiles to himself, thinking back on way too many blushing denials from Pavel in the face of Hikaru's admittedly-obnoxious sing-song teasing.

"If he's in love with McCoy, he's admitting that I was right about something that he argued against so heatedly, for so long. I know Pavel, okay? I'll bet he ruled out a hundred other possibilities before he finally settled on 'love'."

Jim doesn't answer, but he doesn't seem any more satisfied or easy about the idea than he did when he first burst into the room.

Hikaru waits, and speaks when Jim doesn't. "So what is it that's bothering you most about this? I know you don't have a thing for McCoy."

They already talked that issue into the ground, sometime around Week Three. The same time Hikaru faced head-on whether his adoration of his best friend was something stronger than friendship.

Jim surprises him by answering seriously. Almost grimly. "Even if I buy into your argument, that Bones has always secretly been a big romantic and that Chekov's a more worldly kid than I think he is...even if he meant those words and Bones really accepts them at face value...we're still talking about two people whose entire relationship is about eleven months of stilted professional run-ins and then four weeks of hell."

That's true, so Hikaru doesn't bother trying to argue the fact.

Honestly, he's going to think about all this after Jim leaves, and he's not going to come out of it any more settled than Jim is. He's already sure of that.

He doesn't want Pavel to be obsessed with McCoy. Not in this grim, life-and-death way he is now. He doesn't want him to think he's in love because he watched McCoy getting his ass kicked for weeks on end. He doesn't want Pavel to really be in love, either.

He doesn't want anything to have changed because of that planet.

Jim seems to accept his silence as the answer it is. He sighs, gusty and deep and dramatic.

"Want to hear something pathetic?"

Hikaru almost smiles at that. "I bet I could top it, whatever it is."

Jim glances over with a matching smile, small and wry. "They're operating on his hands in the morning. His wrists. He's fucking terrified and I know it, because everything in his future depends on how this goes. And me? I'm feeling wronged because I'm not the one in there with him while he worries about it. And I won't be the first one he wants to see when he comes out of it, no matter how it goes."

Jim shakes his head, a hard little prick of anger in his eyes under the smile. "Everything else that's going on right now, and that's what I keep thinking about. How's that for petty, narcissistic bullshit?"

Hikaru can't help but laugh. "Sounds familiar, actually. I had to fight back a temper flare-up earlier because I scheduled us some time on the simulators to get him back into practice, but all Pavel wants to do is sit in sickbay and glare at nurses. I wasn't even angry that he doesn't want to jump back into his duties as fast as he'd normally want to. I was just ticked off that there's anything else he'd rather do than come play computer games with me."

Jim smiles back at that, but it fades fast. "This can't go on. For either of them. Sooner or later Starfleet regs are going to be unignorable, and I'm the guy who's got to enforce them."

Which means that Pavel isn't going to get a choice about those computer simulations, not if he wants to keep his commission. And McCoy's hands are going to be more than a worry, they're going to be a cold black-and-white report to Starfleet regarding whether or not he can serve out his duties.

"The new normal," Hikaru says, thinking about their words days ago, during another session of fretting about their friends. "We've still got some time to decide how it's going to look. So do they. If McCoy's operation is the next big hurdle, there's no use dreading which ways things will go until after tomorrow, right?"

Jim chuckles, leaning over to set his mostly-full coffee cup back on the table. "Very Zen of you."

Hikaru smiles at that. "It's the only thing about my mom's old Buddhist kick that stuck with me, the idea of letting go of the past and future and just worrying about right now."

"It's an idea I can get behind," Jim agrees.

"Mmm, unfortunately it's pretty damned hard to do when you need to the most."

"You think so?"

Jim leans back, arm stretching over the back of the couch. He grins, more Jim Kirk and less worried friend. "Maybe you just need to make your 'right now' a little more stimulating."

Hikaru grins even as something in his stomach warms, and the coffee becomes an unnecessary redundancy.

"Is this the start of your habitual twenty minutes or so of innuendo-laden foreplay?"

"What do you have against innuendo? It's a little more subtle than 'time to fuck', isn't it?"

"Coming from the master of single entendre?" Hikaru grins, the warmth slipping a little more over him, pushing down at some of the worries filling his head every available second. "Subtle isn't exactly your strong suit, Jim."

Jim laughs. It's a nice sound, and if Hikaru has one regret about the non-start of their non-relationship, it's that he hasn't been able to hear it a lot.

They're not dating, they're not a thing. There's no consistency to what they do. But Hikaru's an old-fashioned guy, he likes the idea of making the person sleeping with him laugh, making them happy. Especially when they need it, and God knows Jim needs it lately.

Still, charm and wooing and laughs aside, he can't deny that Jim seems a thousand times more at ease than he did when he first came into the room. Hikaru's responsible for that. It's not a miracle, it's not all that grand. But it's something.

He gets to his feet, setting his cooling coffee down on the table beside Jim's. He holds out a hand.

"Come on. Time to fuck."

Somehow Jim's answering grin and the warmth of his hand as he grips Hikaru's actually do feel a little bit like a miracle.


	7. Chapter 7

"_Jim. This is a mess._"

There's a thrum of barely concealed anger stiffening Jim's shoulders, but he buries his fists under the table and out of range of the viewscreen, and squeezes hard enough to hurt.

His expression stays calm. "I realize that. But you-"

"_You realize that we're already facing damage control based on the original landing part infecting an entire planet of aliens."_

Jim shoots a dark look over at Spock, but turns back to the viewscreen. "I'm aware of the situation that brought us here."

Pike raises his eyebrows over the screen, looking almost sardonic except for the grimness in his eyes. "_But you're still asking the Federation to put its weight behind you and threaten the leadership of this planet into returning your men to you._"

Jim sits back, calm, with Spock on one side and Sulu on the other (where Bones should, of course, be). Confident, he shakes the anger from his shoulders and answers smoothly.

"There's one important thing you don't seem to be taking into account here, Chris."

_"What's that, Jim?"_

"We're talking about _my_ officers. I'm the only Federation vessel within days of here. You're asking me to use patience and restraint enough to wait for a shipload of diplomats to get here and save my crew for me, and in case I haven't brought the point home enough...it's _me._"

"Captain."

He ignores Spock after just a quick glance shows him the first officer is wearing the exact same look of disapproval on his face as the admiral on the viewer.

"Look, Chris. There's a reason I'm talking to you about this and not Barnett. You're still new enough to the job that you remember how to be an officer." He leans in, serious. "If the only alternative Starfleet is giving me is 'wait for the bureaucrats to work this out', you've got to know that's not good enough."

Pike hesitates long enough that Jim knows his point is made. _"Tell me something, Jim. Is there an alternative you can offer me that isn't 'threaten them with interplanetary war until they give me what I want'?"_

Jim's little bubble of confidence sags a bit.

_"You're too smart for this, Jim. Drop the ultimatums and run through the details one more time." _

Jim waves his hand towards Spock. He doesn't have the patience for details right now - he can't seem to shut off the voice in his head reminding him that he abandoned his best friend on a strange planet.

Spock takes up the narrative without hesitating. "One week into their two week assignment, the landing party consisting of Doctor McCoy, Ensign Chekov and Lieutenant Desmarais failed to complete their scheduled check-in at twenty-hundred standard hours. The Enterprise cut short its secondary assignment and returned to the Maalox planet approximately ten hours after the missed check-in. We were informed by the Speaker of the Empress, the main diplomatic contact for the Maalox, that the landing party has committed an unnamed offense and has been taken into custody. The Maalox refuse to release them to our custody and have even made the demand that we supply them a replacement doctor to continue the research that has been interrupted."

Jim finds himself glaring at the table, remembering that first tense comm call with the Speaker even as Spock recounts the details.

"Our attempts to uncover more details regarding the location and condition of our landing party or the offense they have been accused of have proven futile. Our knowledge of the culture is too limited to make an educated guess, and the lack of cooperation from the Speaker has been counterproductive at best."

A hand on Jim's arm managed to pry Jim's glare from the table, and he glances over to find Hikaru regarding him.

Hikaru's a good friend, a strong officer. Jim is used to having Spock and Bones at either side during strategy sessions, but Hikaru is solid enough that even if Jim feels Bones' absence acutely he doesn't feel crippled by it.

Hikaru simply looks at him for a moment, eyes serious, mouth set. Intent, though, enough to remind Jim to get into the game and stop letting his anger and an endless cloud of unknowns hold him back.

"_The planet is not a part of the Federation,_/i" Pike is saying as Jim tunes back in. "i_Any actions taken by us will be seen as on behalf of the Federation. It will be seen as an act of war_."

Jim clears his throat, drawing all eyes back to him. "I get it: force is ineffective in this situation. They're not scared of my ship if I go at them alone, and if the whole Federation gets behind me it looks like we're kicking this planet when they're already down. Which you won't risk, because it's a bunch of idiots in Starfleet that brought them down in the first place.

Spock nods. "We have no idea where they are holding our crewmen, and however the Maalox are blocking our signals they aren't doing it unintentionally. If you were to threaten them they would likely call your bluff, and our cause would not be improved. As long as our aim is to recover our missing three crewmen unharmed, there is no use in force."

Bland and emotionless as always, but Jim knows better. He can hear the clipped quality in Spock's words that means his emotions are closer to the surface than he'd like.

One consequence to Spock and Bones being Jim's right hand men - they have gotten to know each other better than they otherwise would have. Spock considers few people to be friends. He feels the loss of any one of them.

There's a lot about his first officer that is still enigma to Jim, but he knows that much.

_"Okay, Jim. I appreciate your coming to me instead of Barnett, but in this case the officer in me agrees with the admiral.__" _Pike surveys Jim and Spock and Sulu in turn in short, intent bursts. _"Your men haven't been kidnapped by hostiles. They're being held by a government who if not allied to the Federation are at least not enemies. We'll bargain for their return. In that you've got the whole of Starfleet behind you." _

Wait for the bureaucrats. That's the final answer, then.

Jim draws in a breath but doesn't react aside from that. He frowns solemnly as Pike goes on.

_"We're coming, Jim. Admiral Barnett is the one pitching a fit about treating the Maalox with kid gloves, I'll drag his ass there myself if I have to, get the whole party of Fleet diplomats up there. We're coming, so hang tight and don't do anything stupid." _

Jim nods tersely. "Understood, Admiral. We'll wait for your arrival."

Pike reaches out as if to press the control to sever the connection, but hesitates. He sends his old familiar no-bullshit look Jim's way and lowers his voice a little.

_"I know you, kid. You're not waiting for anything. Whatever you do, just be subtle. If you can't even find them, you sure as hell can't recover them. Don't burn any bridges, that's all I'm asking."_

Jim's frown eases and he nods. "I'll do my best, Chris." He owes Pike that much, at least. And if it was anyone but Bones down there, he'd try to offer even more.

Pike flashes a quick, thin smile, like he's reading Jim's mind through subspace, and then he reaches out again and the screen goes blank.

Jim draws in a breath and turns to Hikaru and Spock. "Okay, you heard him. We've got until a ship full of bureaucrats get here to try to resolve this ourselves. Spock, get with Scotty, get a team together, and find out what the hell these primitive shits are using to fool our computers. Sulu, get with Uhura and go through every report they sent up, every check-in, every data packet Bones sent to his lab here. We need any indicator about where they were, any comments about landmarks, any background noises. Tear everything apart."

Spock is already rising from his chair as Jim finishes. Hikaru hesitates a few moments longer, long enough for Jim to meet his eyes again.

Hikaru gives him a quick, appreciative nod, and there's gratitude in his eyes as he pushes away from the table and follows Spock out of the meeting room.

Jim can't help but think, as he takes a few moments in the silence to work out alternate plans to put others to work on, that maybe he ought to bring Hikaru into these sessions more often. For some reason he's good for Jim's focus.

For some reason, he's a pretty damned comfortingly presence.

* * *

"So? What'll it be?"

Len ignores the brightness in Christine's voice. He knows her too well, has worked with her for too long. A good doctor always knows his nurse's Game Face, and that's what she's wearing right now.

She isn't gonna grimace and fret and talk to him like he's about to get wheeled into his own funeral. She's a pro.

Besides, she stands as good a chance as M'Benga to get the CMO job if it should happen to come available. It's not all dark days for her, is it?

Which, okay, isn't fair. But fuck it. He doesn't want to be fair right now.

"Leonard. We're wasting daylight here."

He rolls his eyes but draws his focus back to her and her two hypos. "We're in orbit over a planet, we can follow the daylight for the next fucking century if we have to."

"That's no excuse to take centuries making a pathetically easy decision, you grouch." She holds out the hypos.

It's probably an easier decision than he's making it out to be, but it's not as simple as she suggests.

Local anesthetic or a coma in a can. Those are his two choices. He can lay there limp and snoring while his life's decided for him, or he can stay awake from the shoulders in and listen to every terse word, every breath, every whisper of clothes at every movement. Lay there and hear it all as they work to build his trashed hands back up from the ulnar nerves down.

He doesn't know which drug is in which hypo, but his eyes move back and forth between the two as if he can somehow tell.

"Take 'em both, Doc. Sometimes a little oblivion can be a good thing."

Len blinks at the new, familiar voice, and looks past Christine at the doorway.

Surprise makes him sit up a little straighter. "Admiral?"

Sure enough, Chris Pike looks exactly the same as first time Len ever saw him at the academy, giving a lecture about the Prime Directive that Len had mostly ignored (he wasn't command and never will be, but the classes were required). The lectures were ignorable but the visiting lecturer wasn't.

Even now, rolling himself in in his wheelchair, gray spread thicker through his hair and eyes squinting more at the corners when he flashes that smirk of his, he still looks like the same guy.

Pike always did command from the eyes. Something like spinal injury and a permanent seat in a wheelchair won't ever diminish that.

Len wants to return that familiar smirk but even then it's hard. "What are you doing here, sir?"

Pike grins and waves Christine and her hypos away from the bed, pushing in to her place. "Drop the 'sir' crap, McCoy. I'm taking a break."

"A break?" Len stares at him. "You figure jaunting to this godforsaken corner of the universe is a nice vacation from earth?"

Pike smirks, sitting back and surveying Len with a critical air. "A break from the diplomatic shitstorm I volunteered to be part of."

Diplomatic...

"Jesus." It hits Len for the first time that he hasn't spared a single thought to what's happening on the fucking planet the ship's doing endless lazy circles around.

The Empress is dead. The Maalox can't possibly have found a way to get away with their treatment of Len and Pavel. The Federation's come in to play politics.

It should piss him off. Diplomacy means that the odds they're going to level the entire planet are slim, and Len would have enjoyed a good light show.

But he puffs out a surprised burst of air and sits back against the wall and shakes his head. Anger doesn't come.

Not right now, anyway.

"Oh, it's fun," Chris agrees. "And Jim's favorite new hobby of transmitting daily reports about the recovery of his two wounded officers is sure as hell smoothing things over for us, let me tell you." Chris regards Len, the smirk fading into something a little more serious. "Also means I couldn't help hearing about this operation of yours today."

Yeah, that's why he can't get angry. He's too full of other emotions, anger won't fit. Len can't help but look down at his hands, shivering in their bandages.

Christine is still in the doorway - she's got drugs to administer, one kind or the other, and even an admiral wanting to chat up an old pal isn't going to stop her - and beyond her is a surgical table somewhere, sterile and empty and just waiting for him.

"I hope you don't think I'm being condescending when I say I've got a good idea about how you're feeling right now."

Len looks back at Chris. At the wheelchair, the source and cause of Chris's loss of his ship. He gained a promotion, yeah, but guys like Chris Pike or Jim Kirk would never see earthbound desk duty as a move upward, no matter how much better the rank.

Ironic, maybe. Len's the one who couldn't save Chris's legs. Len's no martyr about his job - it was Nero who ruined Chris's body. Len did his job and did it well, repaired some damage other doctors wouldn't have been able to repair. He just didn't manage to perform a miracle when it was needed.

Still, he can't help but wonder if something about this is a little bit gratifying for Chris.

He nods, silent, since petty thoughts like those aren't worth voicing. "Yeah, I guess you do."

Chris smiles tightly. "Here's the part where I'm supposed to provide platitudes about how no matter what it won't be the end of your life, even if it feels like it will. I'm gonna skip that, if it's all the same to you."

"Appreciated."

"Here's what I will tell you." Chris leans in, lowering his voice. "You're a doctor, Len. Not because that's the assignment you got or the job you took, but because that's what you are. And I don't care if they end up chopping your hands off at the wrists, you're too fucking stubborn to ever be anything but a doctor." He glances down at himself and grins, wry but sincere. "I found a way to keep myself in the game. It's not a captaincy, it's not a starship, but those are details. I'm still doing what I love, and I'm still damned good at it. I don't expect anything less from you."

Len's eyes drop to his shivering hands again, and he knows the words aren't empty platitudes but it's hard to make himself feel anything like hope.

"So you want my advice?" Chris speaks lightly again, voice back to normal volume. "Take both hypos and sleep right through this, because it's not nearly as important as you think it's going to be. It's just one more step you've got to take."

Len smiles, small and tight. "Maybe you're right."

"Admiral Pike."

The tightness slips from Len's smile and he turns his head instantly, seeking out Pavel as he comes in around Christine.

"I didn't know you would be here, sir," Pavel says to Pike, but his eyes find Len and stay there, warm and green. "Hikaru insisted on a couple of runs through the simulators or I would have been here when you woke up. Is it almost time?"

"Apparently." Len nods back towards Christine. "The vultures are circling."

She rolls her eyes at him.

Pavel smiles. He reaches out, lays his fingers feather-light over Len's arm. His eyes go to Pike.

Pike flashes that old familiar smirk, but there's something strained in it. "Ensign _wunderkind_."

For a moment Len sees Pavel as Pike must see him. He's still unnaturally thin - apparently no one's found a good way to make him eat regular meals yet - and thanks to that thinness there's no way to mask the patches of dark shadows under his eyes. Not sleeping well, either.

Len's fault. The kid spends so much time talking him to sleep and fending off visitors and ignoring nurses that he can't get in a solid eight-hours.

But Len doesn't feel guilty about it. He only needs Pavel around just as much as Pavel needs to be around. The not sleeping and not eating would be worse otherwise. He knows it, and it seems Sulu and Jim and the rest of the clucking crew around them have figured it out too.

Anyway, seeing him just for the too-sharp cheekbones and shadowed eyes is missing the bigger picture. Pavel isn't bent under shadows, he's the same hopeful genius he's always been.

He's practically glowing as he smiles at Pike. It's his innocent, wide-eyed _sewenteen _smile, the one he puts on to play the role of the Enterprise infant. Len's learned by now that there's usually not much innocence behind those eyes.

"If you have time while on board, admiral, perhaps we could play a game of chess."

Pike scowls at the kid. "Smart ass."

Pavel blinks innocently.

Len laughs: even Spock doesn't readily volunteer to play Pavel at chess. Pavel told him a couple of stories about chess games with Pike - back in Russia when Pike came down as part of the team looking to recruit him from the Conservatory, and then on earth after the Narada mission during the strange vacuum of time before the ship was refit and Pike was an admiral.

Chris Pike can recover from the loss of his legs and his ship, but apparently getting his king in check puts the man in a high fury.

"It seems silly, perhaps, in hindsight," Pavel said one endless night in their cell, filling the suffocating silence as he did so often, "but it's one reason I chose Starfleet over the i_Voskhod_/i research program or any of the grant projects I was looking at. The fact that this smiling American captain lost so passionately to a child like me and returned the next day to lose again, thinking he had figured out a flaw in my game. Russians are bad losers - we enjoy our suffering too much. I liked the way this American officer lost."

Len grins over at Chris, wondering if he knows the inspirational role he played in Pavel's career path.

Before he can say anything, Christine pushes away from the doorway and breaks her patient silence. "Leonard. We're going to get behind schedule."

Pavel doesn't miss a beat, his hand tightening gently on Len's arm. "If Doctor M'Benga is anything like Len, he won't abide being off-schedule. We'd better go."

Len's smile vanishes. He watches Christine, the two hypos she still holds. He can feel his hands shivering against the sheets pooled in his lap. He can feel the twitch of muscle against Pavel's hand.

He can't do this. Not yet. Another couple of days in limbo, that's what he needs.

"Len?"

He swallows against a tightening throat.

Pavel smiles at him, soft and easy. "We'd better go," he says again, his eyes steady and familiar.

Len hesitates. "You're coming in?"

That easy smile stays on Pavel's face, but there's a catch in his voice that's barely noticeable. "Unless they are prepared to fall much further behind schedule than we already are."

Len can't help a smile at that, and the nerves making him nauseated seem to ease into a warmer twist. Yeah, he can't help but think. Pavel will fight if they tried to keep him away. Pavel will always fight.

He doesn't say anything, but Pavel nods his agreement nonetheless. "Besides, I was thinking about another old fairy tale my grandmother used to tell me, and I want you to hear it. I need you a captive audience for it so you can't mock me too much."

Len's eyebrow arches up. "Yeah? I can still decide to be comatose through the whole thing."

Pavel shrugs. "I will tell you the story either way."

"Of course." Len chuckles. He looks over as Christine's impatience brings her up alongside Pavel. He flashes her a quick smile. "Better give me the local. If I sleep during the kid's story he'll just tell it all over again later."

Christine returns the smile, but it's strangely small and formal. She slips past Pavel long enough to administer the hypo, a careful shot in each arm.

Len knows her too well. He knows that the smile isn't a happy one. He knows when she shoots Pike a look over his body as she's giving him the second shot it's not a friendly look. It's knowing, and it's serious.

It's a 'see, told you' look. Christine's given him that same look before, when some diagnosis she gave is confirmed, when something he was still up in the air about comes down on her side.

Except now the look's directed at Pike, who returns it with something less solemn but just as intent.

It's gonna start pissing Len off pretty soon, all this whispering and sternness and disapproval. It's the same thing that's got Jim staring at Len like he's a stranger, and it's more than a little annoying.

They don't fucking know. That's what it all boils down to. Starfleet gives its officers entire manuals on how to properly recover from beatings and imprisonment. A couple of people don't recover in some by-the-book, neat way, and everyone thinks they can fucking judge them for it.

Pavel takes his arm as he sinks back to lay down and let the drugs kick in. Len looks over, wondering if the kid sees those looks. If they bother him at all.

But Pavel doesn't appear to see anything at all but Len. He smiles without shadows, leaning in to straighten the sheets around him.

Pike leaves first, and Len hears him saying something but he doesn't catch the words. Something loud and cheerful sounding, some last good luck or something. Christine and another nurse bustle around his bed for a few minutes as his arms slowly start to go numb, fingers first until the heavy, foreign feeling is threading up his elbows.

They roll him out of the room and down the wide corridor to an operating theatre.

Maybe it's the drugs making everything seem distant - even locals can get into the bloodstream and muddy up the mind.

Whatever it is, he blinks and he's suddenly in the middle of a spotlight, a ridiculous thin little curtain positioned across his chest as his dead arms are moved into positions and the bass of M'Benga's voice rumbles underneath it all.

Pavel sits beside his bed, leaning in with cheerful eyes, and the rest of the world is a distant muddle but he is sharp and clear. His voice is clear. The words...they seem to slip into Len's head and right out again, but it's the best kind of music.

He finds himself smiling absently, listening to the music of those unintelligible words.

* * *

"You might laugh when you hear this, Len – or probably just assume it's a lie – but I never have regarded myself as being particularly ambitious."

Len doesn't laugh. Len barely holds his eyes open as he lays there, breathing with loud, painful liquid sounds.

Pavel clears his throat and tries not to focus too much. He has taken to running his fingers through Len's hair, almost like a parent stroking a sick child's forehead. The touch seems to be some kind of comfort for Len, and his head is one of the few places it still seems safe to touch.

The Maalox aren't letting him sleep. They aren't giving him time to recover. They have taken him out five different times now, and Pavel has almost managed to find a routine in it. When Len's gone he sits or strands or lays, jogs in place now and then before he gets too dizzy and has to sit again.

When Len's here he sits with him, makes sure he eats. And he talks.

He has no idea what else he should be doing.

"Anyway," he says, watching Len's chest moving up and down unevenly. "You said once that I seek validation, that people like me always do. But I don't. You didn't believe me when I argued it, but I really am being honest with you. I don't care if my name ends up in history books. I don't care that by now the Observatory may have let in someone even younger than me, and that someday a fifteen or sixteen year old who is smarter and stronger will replace me as the youngest officer ever in Starfleet. Those things will happen or they won't – my life doesn't change at all from day to day because of it."

His eyes catch the dark green of limp vegetables. Of course, he's got to make sure Len eats. Sleep deprivation and physical trauma are already enough to deal with without adding malnutrition.

He reaches for today's offering of soggy greenery and sets the platter on Len's stomach. He reaches for Len's arm and brings his hand to the edge of the plate.

Len's eyes shift a little bit, but he makes no move to take hold of the platter or grasp for the food.

Pavel frowns. It may be that Len just isn't hungry – Pavel doesn't seem to be at all lately, and though it's impossible to tell the passage of time in this room with no windows, it seems like it's been many more days than anyone should go without eating.

Still. He watches Len's face, trying to decide if he's even aware enough to recognize the food.

And he talks through it all, needing to fill the silence.

"There is an old fairy tale my grandmother would tell me," he says, stroking Len's hair slowly and soothingly. "She would tell me dozens of them, of course; 'fairy' tale is a misleading nomenclature, since none of the stories I was ever told contained actual fairies. But Russians do enjoy their fables."

He shuts his eyes for a moment, trying to picture his old bedroom, the creak of the bed as his grandmama sat beside him in the dark to talk him to sleep.

"One in particular had quite an impact on me as a child, and it still directs my actions more than any sort of ambition does." He hesitates, eying the plate. "Can you eat a little bit?"

Len stirs at the question. He doesn't answer, doesn't even really move except to look more towards Pavel, but it's enough to let Pavel know that he's listening.

Pavel has no idea how to properly care for someone who has been hurt so badly, for so prolonged a time. If there are procedures in place for tending to a wounded fellow prisoner, he doesn't know them. He has to trust his instincts, limited as they are in this situation.

His instincts say that Len needs to eat, and that he is probably too tired and in too much pain to make the attempt.

Pavel keeps talking, though in the back of his mind he's going through his options.

"This one story," he says, regarding the platter of food as it rises and falls with Len's breaths, "was about a man who married a beautiful woman. Of course the king of his land wanted this woman for his own. The king would issue commands to the husband, sending him on absurd adventures for impossible things so that the wife would be on her own and the king could pursue her."

He reaches for the platter and pinches a leaf in his fingers. His stomach gives a dry gurgling sound, but his eyes stay on Len. He brings the food to Len's mouth.

After a few seconds Len's lips part and he accepts the offering, chewing slowly.

Pavel smiles to himself. "The king makes up a few of these absurd missions to send the man on, but the man succeeds in each one of them. He brings the king everything he asks for and then goes home to his faithful wife. The king plots for a while on a way to outsmart the man, and finally comes up with the answer."

He reaches for another leaf as soon as Len's throat works to swallow the first one.

"The king summons the man and says simply, 'You are to go I know not whither, and fetch I know not what.' The man is, naturally, confused. But trust me, it doesn't pay for a man to question his king, especially in a fairy tale. So the man goes home to his wife, despondent, and gets ready for the trip. He has brought the king exotic treasures, fierce animals, rare fruits, but this is something different. There is no way to complete this task, and of course no way to complete it quickly. So he leaves his home and his wife and sets out on a long, fruitless journey to satisfy the whim of the king."

He falls silent while Len finishes the second offering of food, swallowing with a pained gasp of air. He pulls another small leaf from the platter silently.

"So what happens?" Len asks, his voice little more than a rasp of sound.

"Well." Pavel shrugs. "It's a fairy tale: the man's wife turns out to be a bird, she sends two genies to help him, and eventually he just convinces the local citizens to overthrow the cossack. It's Russian - our stories tend to run on predictable courses."

Len snorts faintly and accepts another leaf.

"But it isn't the ending that stuck with me as a child, it was the premise of the story. This is a good, strong man living an honorable life, and what undoes him – or would have undone him if not for his magical bird wife – is that he is set out to achieve a goal that wasn't defined. He did brave, wonderful things when he set out knowing what he sought. When he simply set out without a destination in mind, he drifted."

Len reaches up and nudges Pavel's arm away when he tries to offer another leaf. He shuts his eyes, breathing in soft, rattling breaths. "So that's how a kid turns into an ambitious child genius."

Pavel smiles. He sets the rejected leaf back on the plate and lets his hand rest on Len's arm. He's still no better at the protocol of dealing with injured superior officers, or injured recipients of youthful crushes, but if he can't feed Len than he has to offer him some other sort of help, and his options are fairly limited.

Besides, it feels right.

"Perhaps it made me ambitious, but I'm fairly certain that I was born a genius." He grins, tight, at Len's soft snort. "I told myself to always have a destination in mind. To always know what it is I'm searching for. Whether or not I can reach whatever goals I seek, that's up to fate. But setting out or wandering aimlessly with no goal in mind? That fault would lay entirely with me."

"So. Starfleet?"

"The stars." Pavel sits back and looks across at the far wall, letting his mind drift back. "I wanted the stars. The Conservatory and the Academy, the lessons I mastered and the awards won for doing so much so young, those were footnotes. They were unlooked-for victories. They were never my goal, and so I think they hardly matter. Starfleet was simply the path I took. Being young and intelligent simply helped me make the trip faster."

"And look where it's led you. Lucky guy." Len speaks more quietly with each word, his breath starting to smooth out a bit.

Pavel tries to laugh, but air comes out without sound. "My goal in coming down to this planet was much less grand than 'the stars', actually."

"Mmm?"

No doubt it's absurd to say anything, but Pavel is nothing if not unfailingly honest. "Hikaru says that I'm in love with you."

Len's eyes open, unfocused but trying to look up at him.

Pavel doesn't look away. He smiles. "I argue with him, but it's possible that particular argument lacks heat. Anyway, whatever it is that brought me here, it doesn't matter anymore. We have new goals now. We must survive this and return to the ship, that must be our goal."

Len's head drops to the side, his cheek resting on Pavel's thigh. He lets out a shaky breath. "Then what?"

Pavel smooths his hair and smiles to himself. "Then I suppose we just have to get over it. Find the next goal."

Len's mouth thins, but he doesn't answer. He leans into Pavel's touch. It seems to put him at ease when Pavel speaks, so without much thought towards what he's saying, he goes on with the next Russian fable he can remember.


	8. Chapter 8

Hikaru isn't surprised by the chime at his door, but seeing Pavel there when it slides open does make him blink. He expected Jim.

Pavel hasn't sought him out once since returning to the ship.

"Hey." He steps back, and smiles at Pavel. "Come on in."

Pavel obeys, looking around his room with wary eyes. He seems unsteady on his feet, and of course he's already too fucking skinny and weak as it is.

But Hikaru doesn't reach out to help him. He knows better than that.

"The doctor has drugged Len," Pavel says suddenly, as if in answer to a question Hikaru didn't ask. "Nurse Chapel says that he will hope for too much too fast and that his hands need time to heal before he attempts to test the repairs. And so they have drugged him to make him sleep through the morning."

Hikaru nods, but Pavel isn't really watching him for reactions either way. He's simply standing there in the middle of the floor, looking around as if he's never seen Hikaru's quarters before.

He feels like a stranger, and Hikaru hates that.

"I don't like leaving him alone," Pavel says after an awkward pause. "But she promised me he won't wake up. And I wanted to..."

"To what?"

Pavel turns to face him suddenly, his eyes wide and bright. He opens his mouth, but shuts it again silently.

Hikaru searches his face carefully. Pavel has always been a bit of an enigma. Ever since that first morning shift when he reprogrammed the voice recognition software during alpha shift's sign-on, Hikaru has never failed to appreciate that his sneaky Russian best friend is hiding a hell of a lot behind those innocent young eyes.

What you see with Pavel is rarely what you get. His genius isn't hidden, of course, but his wicked temper is. Along with a tendency to philosophize like an old man, to drink himself into unconsciousness when he can't make his brain shut off enough to sleep. A fierce desire to be absolutely competent in everything he tries, and a never-silent doubt that nothing he does is quite good enough, despite a lifetime's worth of evidence to the contrary.

There's a lot of intensity hidden behind that cheerful, bright-eyed whiz-kid surface. Hikaru, who has never felt like an especially deep kind of person, has always been fascinated by him. Hikaru was born with his heart on his sleeve and he's never really been taught how to cover himself up. He never saw the need to learn.

He isn't deep, he knows that about himself. But he knows Pavel appreciates him for that, the same way Hikaru is so interested in learning all the layers hiding his young Russian friend from outsiders.

Pavel relies on Hikaru's steadiness. He hasn't had a lot in life he has been able to rely on.

Even now, when everything seems so strained and different, Hikaru wants to be able to be steady for him. But Pavel is a puzzle to him at the best of times; he is completely inscrutable now.

Hikaru can't begin to guess what's got him there, standing silent and troubled. Hikaru isn't sure how to fix him, or even how to support him.

So he plays it safe.

"Did the doctor say anything? About the surgery? Did they give him a good prognosis at least?"

"Of course not." Pavel answers too fast. "They are cowards, they refuse to even guess at his chances. They assume the worst and it's absurd. They will put odds on officers living through surgeries every day, but they won't even attempt to tell us if his poor hands will recover."

Too fast, all his words, and too sharp. Hikaru moves up to him, brow furrowed, studying him as he talks.

Pavel glances towards him, almost wary, but keeps on looking around as if there's anything at all interesting about Hikaru's small front room.

"We already know that he'll be fine. Len and I, I mean. We know it. I know it, and I tell him, and he believes me. I have to be there when he wakes up, so if everything isn't perfect I can tell him again that it doesn't matter. That he'll be fine, it just takes time. I have to make him believe..."

He draws in a breath, his rambling and quick words trailing off. He turns to Hikaru abruptly.

"I don't know how to help him," he says, even faster than his last words. A confession, Hikaru realizes. Pavel always rushes the things he doesn't want to say. "He listens to me and believes me, and if I'm wrong..."

Hikaru knows why he's here now. He knows, just looking at those too-bright eyes, that his Pavel isn't any different now than before he left on the away-mission.

He is still fierce in his insistence that he rely on himself, that he isn't a child who needs help but an officer just as the rest of them are. He still hides the things that he thinks make him seem weaker.

But he still needs his best friend when the things he has to hide become too much for him.

Jim comes to Hikaru because he isn't allowed to help McCoy and he can't accept that. Pavel has come to him because he's the only one who can help McCoy, but he's a scared eighteen year old who has never had a man's future in his hands before.

Hikaru moves in and offers a smile. "McCoy is a doctor, Pasha. He already knows as well as Chapel or M'Benga what his odds are. If they're refusing to give him any reassurance that things will be okay, then you offering that reassurance isn't going to damage him. It isn't going to make anything worse, even if you're wrong."

Pavel opens his mouth to answer and then shuts it. He watches Hikaru carefully, looking like he's utterly lost otherwise.

Hikaru should have known better, really. He's groused to Jim about Pavel spending all his time in sickbay, he should have realized that Pavel was taking too much on himself. He should have seen this coming.

He reaches out, lays his hand on Pavel's arm. "You're helping him. You have to know that. Offering him hope is a good thing. Trust me, he's pragmatic enough on his own. If he listens to you, even better."

Pavel blinks down at his hand, and when he looks back up there's a track of moisture down his cheek. But his voice is steady when he answers.

"If he doesn't get better. If he can't be a doctor..."

Hikaru can't help but look at that damp line streaked down his cheek - he's known Pavel for a year now and this is the first time he's seen tears. No amount of danger, homesickness, not the deaths of crew or the death of Spock's mother - which Pavel has never stopped blaming himself for - have ever made him shed tears. Not in front of Hikaru, at least.

"He'll be something else." Hikaru meets his eyes and speaks with all the steady sincerity he can. "He may think that his job is everything, but if he wakes up tomorrow and can't operate, he won't stop breathing."

Pavel draws in an unsteady breath. "I don't know how to help him."

Hikaru frowns. "It's not your job to help him."

"Of course it is!" Pavel turns away, shaking Hikaru's hand loose. "Everything that happened to him should have happened to me just as badly! How can it not be my responsibility to-"

"Pavel." Hikaru studies his profile. "If you're only trying to help him because of guilt..."

Pavel shakes his head but doesn't answer.

Suddenly alarmed, Hikaru moves around to meet his eyes again. Jim was right to be worried - Hikaru knew that. But it's even clearer now.

"If you're taking this on yourself because of guilt," he tries again, "then that's your own issue to deal with. You need to work it out without making it McCoy's problem."

Pavel's eyes narrow, his hands clenching at his sides. He looks over at Hikaru but doesn't meet his eyes. "How can you even think that? You, of all people?"

Hikaru reaches for him again, but Pavel turns away just enough to make it clear that Hikaru's touch is unwanted.

"Let me finish," Hikaru says, dropping his hand. "If you're taking on responsibility for him for a reason besides guilt, that's a different story. If you're worried about him because you care about him, then your duty is to help him as best you can. Not to swoop in and play miracle worker and heal all his problems."

Pavel does meet his eyes at that, and for a moment he looks every inch the wide-eyed seventeen year old Hikaru first met.

"If I can't heal him than he protected me for nothing. What am I...am I worth, if I can't..."

Hikaru watches it coming but it feels, for a moment, surreal. Watching his eyes fill, his words break and cut off, his face bow.

He moves in without thinking, pulling Pavel in to him, playing the big brother that he once thought of himself as before realizing that he relies on Pavel as much as Pavel relies on him.

Pavel leans in to him, stiff in a way that tells Hikaru that he doesn't seek out comfort very often.

Hikaru hugs him, silent, not bothering to shush him or whisper empty platitudes about how okay everything's going to be someday. He's never been good at hollow comfort, and Pavel's too smart to believe in it.

He holds onto him and feels Pavel's thin shoulders shaking against him, feels dampness cooling against his shoulder. He just lets himself grab on as tightly as he's wanted to since the day Pavel transported down to that planet.

* * *

"Huh."

Jim looks over, stretching his body out, enjoying the luxurious stretch of post-sex ache. He can't help but grin when he sees his bedmate, and the thoughtful look Hikaru is casting at the ceiling.

"'Huh?' That's all I get?"

Hikaru laughs softly, still catching his breath. "Give me time here. I've got like eleven months worth of rumor and gossip to compare this to. Gonna take me a few minutes to decide how the reality stacks up."

Jim smirks. "I'm not worried. Take your time."

Hikaru's body glows, pale, clean, smooth lines in the dim half-light of Jim's quarters. It's a nice sight, so Jim doesn't bother looking away from him. He rolls onto his side, props his head up on his hand.

Hikaru twists his head, looking over. His smile is slow and lazy, the same irreverent smile he always gives Jim, with maybe a hint of something new in it.

Jim didn't mean for things to go this way. He really did only ask Hikaru to have dinner in his room to get both their minds off of the frustrating battle with the planet below them.

But Hikaru has always been so present, so steady. So calm and strong. It's so easy to lean on him at any given time, the fact that he's in this with Jim, that he is missing his best friend the same as Jim, only made it easier.

Besides...Jesus. The guy's fucking hot.

His grin slips off his face a moment later, and he smiles with something like sadness. "Damn it."

"Mm?"

Jim lays back, rubbing his tired face. "I haven't slept with anyone for the past four years without my first stop the next day being a bragging session with Bones."

Hikaru chuckles, but it's faint. "I'm the first one to stick up for how intelligent and worldly Pavel is, but I haven't found a way yet to talk to him about the people I've slept with."

"Oh, Jesus." Jim laughs. "Don't tell me I've got a virgin on my crew. I'm trying to build a reputation here."

"Are you seriously asking me if my missing teenage best friend has ever gotten any?" Hikaru waves a hand lazily. "Don't answer that. I've met you: of course that's what you're asking. He's never slept with _me_, that's all I can tell you."

"Mmm. So he's either straight or celibate."

Hikaru looks over, eyebrows raising. "Was that your version of a post-sex compliment? Because it's disturbing, but pretty sweet."

Jim shrugs, slipping back on his side. "I've got high standards. You being here at all is my version of a compliment."

"Oh, Jesus." Hikaru rolls his eyes, but he slides in closer to Jim. "I don't know whether to be flattered or to remind you that we only did this to take our minds off things. You might have been able to ignore your usual high standards in the name of distraction."

"Might have been able to," Jim agrees. He meets Hikaru's dark eyes and smiles, small and sincere. "But didn't have to, in this case. Lucky me."

"Lucky you." Hikaru's hand slips out, sliding across Jim's stomach and around his side. It's a light touch, slow, almost soothing.

Jim's smile cracks. "We're going to get them back."

"Yeah. We are." Hikaru's eyes go distant for a moment - his thoughts going off-planet, towards his straight and/or virginal best friend most likely.

Jim understands that. If he could he'd probably lay there and have an entire conversation about this whole thing with Bones in his mind. Hell, he always knows what Bones would say about it. The gripe about one more notch on Jim's bedpost, the grousing about a captain who can't keep his dick in his pants. Knowing Bones, he'd probably jump right on the fact that this was more ill-conceived than most of Jim's assignations, since Hikaru is a direct subordinate and a friend.

But he doesn't want to have that silent conversation. He wants Bones back. He wants this talk in person, sitting in Bones' office in sickbay or hanging out in Jim's front room, maybe even with Spock sitting there on the other side of a chess board trying his best to ignore their oh-so-human hormone-obsessed conversation.

He wants things back where they belong.

But Bones isn't here, and if things are going to be fucked up then having them be fucked up with Hikaru in his bed is about the best thing Jim can hope for.

Still, he can't smile without sadness in it suddenly, without feeling the loss of Bones like a pain in his chest.

"We are," he says again softly. Insistent.

Hikaru wants to believe it as badly as he does, so it's an easy thing to say.

* * *

Len looks away as the door shuts behind Pavel. He draws in a breath and lets it out slowly as he turns his focus back to Christine.

She's eying the door as well, an eyebrow raised. "I feel like I just kicked a puppy. He does realize I'm here to help you, right?"

Len shrugs. "You realize the same thing about him?"

Of course Pavel wasn't happy to leave. He's been fighting every attempt to separate he and Len since before they left their cell.

He's the one who sat up for hours with Len, who held him after M'Benga's first nerve tests the day before. Who stayed awake and talked a sleepless night away as if they're still back in that cell.

Of course Pavel doesn't want to leave. He shouldn't have to. Maybe he isn't a huge help in Christine's eyes, but he sure as hell makes Len feel better about...pretty much everything.

Len needs that right now, but she refused to start while the kid was here. And he couldn't bring himself to make his case, to beg for Pavel's presence.

Maybe that's a good sign: a return of some of his pre-Maalox pride.

She sighs, turning back to him. Her expression is troubled, but it always is these days. "Leonard..." He shakes her head after a moment. "Never mind, this isn't the time or place. Are you ready to begin?"

He scowls - not the time or place for _what _exactly? - but doesn't protest.

"Okay, we're going to take this slowly to start with. Jabilo wants another nerve test to compare to the one pre-surgery, There will probably be some evidence of numbness - as brilliant as he is I doubt any doctor could catch every single nerve on the first try. But we should see marked improvement all around."

She smiles at him. It's her Game Face again.

"After that we'll work on a few basic exercises..." She tugs a small rubber ball from her case and sets it in front of him on the bed. When he rolls his eyes she just laughs. "You're the one who insisted on stocking up on low-tech therapy equipment, Mr. CMO. You wanted the human touch, you got it."

It makes Len think of endless hours on a stone floor, trying to explain to an amused Russian kid why he'd want to be known as a Sawbones, why he preferred the old methods of healing. Why the touch of a hand is always better than a cold scan from a tricorder.

He looks towards the door, smiling to himself faintly.

"Leonard?" Christine draws his gaze. "Something funny? Not that I don't prefer this to the nervous wreck I assumed you'd be, but..."

He doesn't bother to explain - she's the one who sent Pavel away, after all, obviously she wouldn't understand.

He turns back to her and stretches out his hands. "Forget it. Let's just do this before I start thinking about all the reasons I really ought to be a nervous wreck. "

* * *

He can't do it anymore.

He's talked himself into believing that, but as the door to the cell grinds open he has to tell himself all over again as fear threatens to douse his certainty.

He can't do this anymore.

He can't play the silent witness, sit and stare while they take Len away again. He can't watch the terror growing in Len's eyes, or the pain spilling from them when these monsters bring him back.

He's said it for days now – he is an officer the same as Len. He can take his share of the punishment.

Len is unconscious or faking it well as the door opens. That makes it easier for Pavel to slip from the flood beside him, to push himself slowly up on strangely unsteady feet.

He steps out between the Maalox and Len, and he tries to feel calm but they're huge, broad, and cruel, and he knows he isn't as strong as Len.

Still his voice is somehow steady.

"If you take him again you'll kill him," he says, though the aliens aren't bothering to wear their translators anymore. "I will go."

The Maalox look at him in distant interest, but one moves into the cell and past Pavel as if he isn't there.

Pavel turns, grabbing the beast by the arm. Stupid, so stupid, but he can't let them focus on Len again.

The Maalox stops, turning back to him. Pavel doesn't know how to read his expression – he might be angry, he might be amused. But he stops.

Pavel looks back steadily and speaks firmly. "I will go in his place." He holds his arms out, wrists up, hopefully an unmistakable gesture even through the cultural gap.

The alien says something in his rough staccato language, pushing Pavel's hands back, a rumble coming from his throat. Laughter or growl? Pavel can't tell.

"No." He moves fast as the alien turns again. He puts himself between the alien and Len. He holds his arm out again. "Me." And when the alien moves to knock his arms out of the way again, Pavel catches his hand.

It's a thoughtless gesture, instinct. Fast and unconscious, he bats the Maalox's arm away.

The alien's rumbling is suddenly less friendly.

Pavel's wrist is grabbed, the alien's broad, square-palmed hand grasping a fierce hold.

The alien regards him with too-bright black eyes, and it seems obvious from this close that it's anger behind those strange eyes.

Pavel opens his mouth to speak, to insist. He is nothing if not stubborn.

But before he can say anything the alien shoves him away. His back slams into the stone wall of the cell, and the alien's voice is a hiss over his head somewhere.

They take Len. Of course. Just being shoved so hard into the wall stuns Pavel for a few precious seconds, and even when he steps away from the wall to try again the first Maalox's eyes jerk over to him, and he's somehow frozen there.

The Maalox keeps his eyes on Pavel as they haul Len's limp body towards the door. He says something right before he leaves, something directed at Pavel. This time the threat in his voice is so obvious that Pavel doesn't have to waste time guessing what he's saying.

* * *

Maybe fifty percent of what's underneath his brand new skin actually belongs to him.

The skin is pretty much all fake. Grown in sterile cultures, based on his own skin but not. An exact duplicate down to the cellular level, and with a few months of use it will lose its artificial pinkish sheen and look just like his hands used to look. No one will be able to tell.

But it's not him.

Len's a sucker for old-fashioned medicine but he's normally not a luddite about what modern medicine can do. He's saved too many lives, found too many cures with the newest technology the medical field has developed. But this is different.

This is underneath his own skin. These are his hands.

He is a doctor who has always known the value of touch, and his hands aren't his anymore.

He's really trying not to be melodramatic about it: he's not some cyborg. He's all organic, all natural. It's absurd to even be aware of it. How many replacements has he done for crewmen before? Re-growing and replacing limbs, skin graft, muscle regeneration. He's never had the slightest kind of feeling about them one way or the other. Never looks at anyone differently because he knows their leg is artificial, or their heart beats with the help of implanted cardio-stimulators.

What the hell is his problem?

"I hear you're being Extra Bonesy today."

Not the best thing to draw him out of a funk, since Jim's got a good history of pissing him off when he tries to cheer him up. But Len looks up, glad for any kind of distraction from watching his strange fingers fist again and again.

"If Christine's got some complaint about my attitude," he says through a tight jaw, "she can grow a pair and tell me about it herself."

Jim's eyebrows fly up. He flashes his usual smirk and slides into the room, perching on the edge of the bed beside Len. He watches him for a minute, watches his hands curling into fists and then relaxing a few times.

"She says it went pretty well," Jim goes on after a minute. He never can abide silence for long.

Len shrugs, forcing his hands down to his sides. He hates sitting in this bed, and at least now they can start talking about letting him out. He's still got a few sore spots, he's gonna walk with a limp for a while thanks to those bastards treating his knee about the same as they treated his hands. But he's not dying, not bleeding out. And he's officially allowed to use his hands again.

Or someone's hands, anyway. These hands, whoever they belong to.

"You gonna tell me about it?" Jim asks after another minute, his smile starting to strain at the corners.

Len heaves a sigh but sits back, letting his hands lie on his lap.

"Some numb spots still. Nothing we didn't expect. I'm a couple weeks from trying anything delicate, at least so Christine says. Apparently she's spending her off time hunting down puzzles and searching the computers for dexterity tests and things. I don't know."

"Sounds good." Jim grins, but the question's behind his eyes. "Don't tell me you were expecting a miracle? Some kind of instant solution?"

"No." Len wants to roll his eyes and say something withering about Jim only playing the wide-eyed optimist when he wants to get to Len. But he doesn't.

He looks down at his hands and wonders if his fingerprints have changed.

"I was expecting to relax," he says finally. He holds up his left hand - the worst of the two - and just watches it for a moment. Both hands shook before the surgery. Badly. Visibly. Now as he holds his hand up there is an occasional minute twitch, but that's it. And that will fade with time.

Even if there are still trouble areas, even if the exercises the next few weeks show that he's got some major dexterity issues, at least he doesn't shake.

He drops his hand back to his lap, dropping his head back against the propped-up pillow, shutting his eyes.

"Instead I almost feel worse. I can't figure that shit out."

"You're just nervous," Jim says after a moment, hesitant enough that Len knows he's got no idea. "In your mind the surgery was probably going to be the border, the black-and-white line determining whether you get to get back behind a scalpel. Instead it's still a shade of gray."

Len frowns. As good a guess as any, but it doesn't feel entirely right.

He opens his eyes and blinks out at Jim. "I'm a doctor."

Jim smiles. "Damn right."

He doesn't understand, but Len doesn't need him to. It feels like it's been months since Len's been anything but a prisoner, a bundle of screaming nerve endings. But no. He's a doctor.

"Len?"

It's almost instant, the way Len's eyes are drawn away from Jim and to the door. He hears in response to that voice as Jim mutters something under his breath, something annoyed-sounding. But he doesn't pay it any attention.

He smiles. "Hey, kid."

Pavel comes in and around the bed. "Nurse Chapel ambushed me the moment I got away from Hikaru." His eyes slide over to Jim and away again. "It's as if people are trying to delay me deliberately."

Len's eyebrows go up, since Pavel's got a sharper sense of awareness than most people give him credit for, and Jim's looking really irritated that he made it into the room.

Pavel moves in close and reaches for his arm. "Progress, then?"

Len lets him examine his hand, smiling a little at the critical look on Pavel's face. As if he can see each repair and correction for himself.

"Yeah, apparently."

As amused as Len is by that little sniff of critique on the kid's face, he relaxes all the same when Pavel seems to approve of what he sees.

Pavel lowers his arm but doesn't let go. As his eyes go to Len's face his fingertips brush lightly over Len's fingers, his palm, the lines of his knuckles. "You're not happy."

"Jabilo's a damned artist, I got nothing to complain about."

Pavel smiles, and there's something knowing in it. "That's why you're not happy."

"What, because he's got no reason to bitch?" Jim speaks up, a shade too loud. "You don't know Bones very well, kid. He's always got something to bitch about."

Pavel looks over at Jim. He speaks evenly, through that same small smile. "No, Captain. Because now everything seems healed. Now everyone will think that the worst is over, and will talk to him about being back to normal, and how well he is recovering." He looks back at Len. "Now everyone will act as if it's all over, but in his mind it isn't even close to being over."

Len sucks in a short breath between his teeth. _That _feels right.

His hands don't shake anymore, Christine's hunting down dexterity exercises, they're going to release him and take him through a course of therapy and around him everything will go on like it always has. He'll be a Survivor.

But he still wakes up sure he's in a cage. He still thinks his pillow is Pavel's lap. He still can't sleep without Pavel's voice in his ear.

He still feels the shadows piled on top of him, the invisible weight of being Nothing to a pack of sadistic aliens.

The human body doesn't remember pain. Not the way it can recall other feelings, other senses. Other memories. A mind can remember trauma - hell, a person's lucky if they ever forget trauma - but pain itself can't be relived.

So without his injuries there to mark him anymore, it feels as if he's gotten past those horrible weeks. It feels like he should have, anyway. And he hasn't.

He meets Pavel's eyes and sees the understanding there, and remembers that Pavel has been out of sickbay and going to simulators and living this exact thing for days now.

"Is it getting any easier?" he asks, genuinely curious.

Pavel shrugs. "I'm not speaking about me, Len. I'm speaking about you. I don't compare what I went through with what you did. I'm not so self-centered."

Len reaches out, lets his strange new fingers brush over a wayward lock of golden curl at Pavel's temple. The hands may not be natural, may not be his, but he can feel things through them and maybe that's a start.

Pavel smiles, and it shines from his eyes. "This is good," he says quietly. "Your hands, what the doctor has done."

"They're not my hands," Len says in answer, though he doesn't mean to voice that particular half-formed resentment so soon.

Pavel laughs softly. "Of course they are. They've been given to you, designed for you, so they're yours."

Len draws his hand back, looking down at the unspoiled, soft skin. "They don't feel like mine."

"You'll get used to them." Pavel reaches out and slips his fingers through Len's, careful but firm. "It took you a while to get used to me, but you did."

Len grins despite himself. "Almost, but you're a little different than a pair of-"

"Not really." Pavel meets his eyes. "You weren't born with those hands, but they've been given to you. In that way we're very much alike."

Len shakes his head in bemusement. "Kind of sappy, kid, aren't you?" He tosses a grin over at Jim.

The grin nearly vanishes entirely when he sees the expression on Jim's face.

Oblivious, Pavel chuckles. "Enjoy it while you can. Nurse Chapel informs me that you spent the afternoon squeezing her balls, and that she plans to return the favor in tomorrow's session."

Len draws his gaze away from Jim - he's glaring, practically, and right at Pavel, and what the fuck is everyone's problem with the two of them anyway? - and can't help but laugh at the grin on the kid's face.

He won't admit it out loud, especially not with his best friend sitting there firing death glares at Pavel, but feeling the warmth of Pavel's skin, the bones of knuckles and softness of skin, the rasp of callouses and the jab of blunt fingernails, does make the hand that Pavel's holding on to feel a hell of a lot more like it belongs to Len than it did before.


	9. Chapter 9

The noises start only a few minutes after the Maalox drag Len out of the cell that day: the one alien that Pavel grabbed looks at him with something angered and hostile in his eyes, and then they all leave and silence falls, until...

He realizes what it is at once. There is nothing in the universe that sounds like the screaming of a man in pain. He isn't sure that he's just imagining that he can tell who it is - Nyota would know, perhaps, if voices are distinct through something like a scream.

But there's no one else it could be. There's been no mention, no hint, of any other prisoners in this place, no activity outside their door that didn't involve them. There is the Maalox, Len, and Pavel, and the rest of the universe might as well be a completely different dimension.

So this sound, this screaming. This is Len.

It's like the first time they brought Len back so injured. It's the same creeping, cold feeling of disbelief, of surreal fear and a strange sense of disconnect.

He looks towards the door as if he'll be able to see through the stone if he tries hard enough.

He's been able to hear sounds before, but nothing like this. He's heard muffled voices, sometimes cries of pain. Sometimes he's picked Len's voice out of it, but usually he tries not to focus on it too much.

This is different. This is hideous, a prolonged wail, and he can't even imagine what it might take to make a man scream that way. If he was on fire, slowly burning, he might scream like that. What can these bastards with their blades and strange squared guns and their hammy, blunt fists possibly be doing right now to make this happen?

He shuts his eyes, but it only makes the sounds seem heavier around him. He pushes back to sit against the far wall away from the door, but the room isn't big enough to make any difference.

He wraps himself up, brings his hands up over his ears, hums to himself, but the screams go on. Sometimes they fade, sometimes they well back up in hoarse shouts. Pavel thinks he can hear tears in the screams, and then anger, and then nothing at all, just mindless pain.

They're punishing him. For what? For Pavel trying to go in his place? For some other imagined insult? Or is this a natural progression?

Maybe it will be like this from now on.

It goes on for a while. It's hard to hold on to a perspective of time in this room, but it feels like an hour, more maybe. Pavel manages to get over his disbelief, his denial of what's happening out there. He manages to stop his humming and drop his hands from his ears.

He manages after a while to get used to the screams.

His mind wanders, as it so often does. Sometimes he works out entire formulas in his head, sometimes he draws them on the stone wall with his finger just to make them seem more real for a moment. He has solved equations in this room that he's spent months puzzling over in his spare time.

Or maybe he just thinks he has. His mind is distracted, his finger-writing illusory. Maybe he's only imagining that his solutions make sense.

At one point, during a relatively quiet spell, he looks to the freshest platter of food. There is more of that leafy vegetable - whatever it is it seems to be a staple of the Maalox diet - and some coarse, possibly stale bread.

He can't remember the last time he ate.

It's strange to realize it. The Maalox have brought platter after platter of leafy green, day after day, but he has no idea what it tastes like.

It was never a conscious decision not to eat, but as he looks at the platter now and realizes how long it's been, his vision seems to tunnel.

Even the voices, the sounds of movement, the thud of flesh pounding on flesh, fade back into almost nothing.

He pushes to his feet and stands there, dizzy, before his feet remember how to move and he drifts over to the abandoned platter. He drops to his knees in front of it, and reaches his hand out towards the pile of steamed, soggy greens.

His stomach grumbled for the first few days, enough that he got irritated at himself. Then it was only in his head to take care of Len, to deal with what these bastards had in store and stand with Len against it.

Now his stomach doesn't growl. He can smell the vegetable, the rich, organic tang of it in his nose. Must be what it tastes like, that earthy, tangy flavor.

He can recite statistics about how long a person can go without food. The Maalox bring them plenty of water, pitchers of it, enough that Pavel never worries about taking too much and has never deprived himself of it for Len's sake.

But even if he stays hydrated, there's only so long he can not eat before his body starts wasting from the inside out. He has to eat. He never meant to not eat.

He reaches out and pinches a leaf in his fingers, just as he does when Len is awake and can eat what he feeds him.

But he stops.

The leaf falls back on the pile and he draws in a breath. Len is somewhere out there, somewhere close, maybe just on the other side of the wall. He is already broken, already hurting worse than Pavel has ever seen before. And they are doing it again, hurting him more, making him vent those nightmare screams.

How can Pavel possibly be thinking about having a _snack_, knowing that's going on?

His throat feels dry and desperate, but he turns away from the plate with a grimace. He can't do it, not while he's already sitting alone and unharmed, already in such better shape than Len.

He has to turn away from the plate. He has to push himself back, to crawl on his knees back to the far wall and away from the temptation of the food. When Len gets back, when he's sleeping or too hurt to eat, Pavel will have a little.

Not now. Not with those screams...

It takes him a few minutes to realize that the screams have fallen silent. Not just the screams, the voices, the shouts, the sounds of movement, the thudding blows.

His breathing, quick and uneven, is the only thing he can hear.

He falls very still, listening. He tries to slow his breath, tries to hold it as long as he can.

There's nothing.

Silence isn't unusual, but there's something about this silence. Something grim and sudden and complete.

He pushes to his feet, but there isn't anywhere to go. He can't exactly open the door and peek his head out and ask where everyone is.

He can't do anything.

When footsteps come at last, heavy, solitary footsteps, he backs up away from the door and stops breathing.

The door grinds its way open and one of the Maalox comes in. Just one, and familiar...

The one Pavel grabbed. The one who seemed so angry at his insistence that he go in Len's place.

Pavel stumbles back into the wall.

The Maalox stares at him for a moment. He doesn't seem angry anymore, but what's replaced anger in his eyes is hard to interpret. He seems almost contented. Satisfied.

"Where is Len?" Pavel asks, his voice a too-fast burst of sound.

The Maalox regards him.

Pavel gestures towards Len's spot on the floor. Not that anything marks it as Len's spot, but it's beside the platter of food. It's where Pavel pulls him to, where he sits him up and holds on to him and feeds him leaves.

He gestures, and can hear the tightness in his voice, "Where is he?"

The Maalox looks over to the empty spot on the floor, and his mouth creases as if he understands. Pavel doesn't know these creatures, he has no idea if it's anger or a smile or a threat.

The alien shakes his head. He looks over at Pavel and gestures towards that spot on the floor, shaking his head. He makes a gesture with his hand, sharp and quick, an almost violent slicing of the air level with his throat.

It means nothing to Pavel, but he knows what it means. Somehow.

He licks dry lips and swallows, pressing back against the wall. "No."

The alien moves in, replacing an empty water pitcher with a cleaner, full one. He shoots Pavel another look, making that same gesture across his throat. He says something, something fast and sharp and alien, and rumbles with what sounds like laughter.

"No." Pavel can't breathe. He sinks into the stone as if he could vanish inside of it. "He isn't dead."

The alien moves back to the door with the empty pitcher in his hand. He turns back before he shuts the door, nodding at the spot on the floor before pointing his free hand out towards Pavel.

_You're next, _the gesture says to Pavel.

He moves off the wall but his knees are unsteady under him. "No," he says again.

The alien leaves, shutting the door behind him almost gently under its rusty whine.

Len isn't dead. Pavel is wrong about those gestures, that look, that expression. He doesn't understand these aliens and he's misinterpreting.

It's deadly quiet out there, and this is the first time one of them has come around while Len was still gone.

But Len isn't dead.

His mind refuses to make sense of even the idea of it. Len isn't dead, because if he is dead then what's the use of Pavel being left alive?

He isn't dead. That Maalox...it was the one who got so angry at Pavel. He's playing a trick, that's all. A kind of revenge for Pavel standing up to them. It's funny for him, some kind of joke. Some kind of revenge. Punishment.

No. The Maalox have been clear on what their idea of revenge is.

Len isn't dead, though.

He realizes after a while that he's curled up against the wall, that he's staring at the door and there's wet warmth all down his face, and the only coherent thought he's having, again and again, is 'he's not dead, he's not dead, he's not dead.'

Realizing what he's doing and thinking doesn't stop those things, though. He feels the tears sliding down his chin, tracking down his neck or dripping into his sleeve, and he thinks 'he's not dead, he's not dead, he's not dead' until the words are meaningless sound repetitions.

He's not dead. He's not dead.

Time warps and slows and crawls around him, and he can't wipe the mantra from his mind. He can't stop himself from rocking against the wall, from staring at the door until his eyes hurt from it.

Maybe it's a trick, maybe he misinterpreted, maybe both. But Len isn't dead.

Eventually, out of nowhere, the screams begin again, fresh and loud and horrible.

He's not dead.

Pavel crawls to the door and leans against it, his ear pressed into the wood so that he can hear Len even better. He shuts his eyes and concentrates until the sound of screaming pushes all words from Pavel's mind.

It's a wonderful sound.

* * *

It's been six weeks since he's been in this room.

Len looks around, feeling like a tourist. He takes in Jo's photo on his small desk, the vidscreen on the wall, the small replimat that serves as his kitchen. The table beside the small couch is crammed with padds. Medical journals. He's always behind on his reading.

Christ, he's missed almost two months of updates. They might've found a cure for death in the last month and he wouldn't know it.

There's a familiar glass bottle full of amber sitting among the padds, and for a moment he wants a drink so badly his hands shake with it.

Or maybe they just shake.

He looks away - best not to jump right to that crutch. He'll probably need it a hell of a lot in the foreseeable future, best not dive in too fast.

His vidscreen is flashing at the corner, a small red light. He's got messages waiting, calls from off-ship. Maybe Joce and Jo heard about him missing.

He doesn't go over, though, doesn't open his mouth to ask the computer to play messages.

It's strange, he's standing right dead center of his old life, and he can't bring himself to take a real first step back into it.

Maybe Pavel was right. Maybe the more everything gets back to normal the more he's going to hate himself for not truly feeling like he's even out of the cage yet.

He doesn't know how long he's been standing there when the door chimes. Strange, familiar sound.

He clears his throat and tries to school himself to look like he's got some idea what he's doing. "Come."

The door slides open.

Of course it's Jim, of course he's grinning as he walks in like he's just won some award finding Len standing in the middle of his front room.

"Hey! You're a free man! You know I had to track M'Benga down and ask him where the hell you were? What's the good of being captain of a starship if I can't abuse my position and know about these things ahead of time?"

Len shrugs, planting a smile on his face. "You get to barge in wherever you want when you do find out about these things. That's worth something, right?"

Jim thinks about that. "Huh. Yeah, guess so." He glances around the quarters, at Len standing there so awkwardly in the middle of the room. "How about some dinner? It's been a long damned time since we had a meal together, Bones."

Len rolls his eyes, but it gives him something to focus on. He forces his feet to move, carrying him towards the replimat before he even answers.

"Usually when you come around wanting dinner you've got some bragging to get off your chest. Usually it's because there's one less person in the crew on your To Do list."

He glances back at Jim, smiling half-assedly with his attempt at humor. His eyebrows fly up at the pink staining Jim's cheeks.

For a second he's almost hurt by it, the realization that Jim's been sleeping around even now. That what happened to Len wasn't enough to even cramp his style.

But that's a fucking selfish thing to feel hurt over, and he faces Jim with his usual stern reaction to this kind of confession.

"For fuck's sake, Jim."

Jim grins, but the red doesn't fade. "Give me some credit, Bones, it's not the same as it usually is. This was different."

"What, you're starting on the non-humanoids?"

"Not yet." Jim actually dips his eyes away from Len, his grin going soft at the corners. "It was Sulu."

"Jesus." Len moves in, studying him, and for a moment it is a little bit like old times. They've had this conversation a hundred times, it's so easy to slip into his role. "You've made some mistakes before, but this one's..."

"I know, I know. He's on the bridge, he's a subordinate. It's improper."

Len snorts. He moves back to the replimat, trying to ignore his small but obvious limp. "If I protested every time you were improper I wouldn't have time to eat or sleep. I don't like the sound of my own voice that much." He glances back at Jim, eyebrows raised. "It's a mistake because you like him."

Jim blinks, his grin fading a little. "He's a friend, yeah."

"Oh, come off it. You _like _him, and you have for months now. If it's news to you it's sure as hell not news to me."

"I don't...of course I like him, but-"

"Jim." Len passed the replimat and goes over to the comm unit, slow and steady, too quick to get tired after weeks on his back.

Jim doesn't answer, doesn't continue his protest.

When Len looks back at him he looks practically serious, thoughtful.

Well, hell. Jim's a genius until the moment hormones factor in to things, but he's still a genius when the hormones fade back. Of course he'll realize that Len's right.

Jim needs reliability. He mocks it mercilessly, but he needs it. It's why he stayed so close to Len when a thousand other cadets were drawn to his baby blues and charming grins. It's why he works so well with Spock.

Len's seen that need in his eyes towards his pilot since the very first mission. Since they saved each other's lives on some oversized drill and came within seconds of splatting to their deaths together on the landscape of a dying planet.

Len's wondered from time to time what it would be like to give in to curiosity and sleep with Jim, start something with him more than what they've got. He catches Jim's speculative looks sometimes, has for years.

He never thought about it seriously, though. Because as much as Jim needs a rock, Len needs to be a rock.

He's broken a marriage, abandoned a daughter, given up on a disease-crippled father. He's let down every person who is supposed to be most important to him, and after the divorce, after he pulled the plug on his dad, he figured he wasn't worth a god damned thing.

He always had a purpose in medicine to keep him going, and he aimed that purpose to Starfleet when he needed a direction. In the end, though, he's only ever thought himself worth what he gives to the people around him. A doctor is only as good as his patients, after all.

Len needs to be the person Jim can come to after a night in bed with the wrong person. He doesn't need to be that wrong person.

Maybe Sulu can be. Who knows? But if Jim went to bed with Sulu thinking it would be the same as every other person on the crew that he's fucked, he's got a few revelations ahead.

Len leaves him to his thoughts and goes to the comm, hitting the line to open a channel.

"What, am I boring you?"

He rolls his eyes but hesitates, closing the channel and glancing back at Jim. "I gotta let Pavel know I'm here. Figured he could join us for-"

"Oh, for God's _sake_."

Those words, that instantly irritated tone, they're like a dash of cold water on Len's thoughts. The part of him that was starting to settle back into his old place as Jim's dubious listening-post for his sexual conquests fades back into nothing.

He drops his hand from the comm line and faces Jim. "Okay. This shit stops now."

Jim moves away with a growl, stalking to his couch and dropping heavily onto it.

Len stays where he is, folding his arms across his chest. "What the hell is your problem with Pavel? The kid's one of your crew, hurt on the same mission I was, and you act like he's just around to piss you off lately. You and Christine both."

"Hey." Jim looks up at him sharply. "I feel just as guilty about Chekov as I...okay, _almost _as guilty about him as I do about you. I'm giving him more recovery time than I should, I'm breaking regs so that he can keep stalking you. What else do I-"

"Stalking me?" Len moves in a few steps, trying to keep his temper in check. This has been building for too long, though. "Pavel has been exactly where I need him to be. You want to get angry about it, get angry at me."

"I've been here, Bones. I've been front-row watching you two. I know exactly who is..." Jim trails off, presses his lips tight together.

Censoring himself, which isn't like him. And that sure as hell isn't what Len wants right now.

"Say it, Jim. I've been watching you and Chris and everybody else looking at me and Pavel like we're fucking freaks, why don't you man up and tell me exactly what the hell your problem is."

"He puts you back in that cell," Jim answers, sharp, glaring out at the room beyond Len.

Len blinks. "Excuse me?"

"I see you. When I come around and it's just the two of us, you're Bones. You're not back to normal yet, but it's coming. You're getting better, you're stronger. And then that kid shows up, and...I can practically see the fucking walls forming around you two when you're together. All that strength I can see coming back to you just flies out the window. And that's not even getting into this i_love/i _bullshit."

Something in Len's gut seems to churn, hearing Jim spit that word out.

Maybe he and Pavel kind of get wrapped up in each other when they're together, but what's so unexpected about that? They spent almost month alone in a room, at least when Len wasn't out getting his ass kicked. They know each other, they're used to each other. Len's leaned on him for weeks, is there some rule that he's got to stop that now that they're out?

Still...hearing Jim bark about love, about this thing that's so clear and understood between he and Pavel, and o_nly _between he and Pavel, makes Len inexplicably nervous.

He speaks carefully. "Exactly what bullshit are you referring to?"

Jim meets his eyes from across the room. "No one falls in love with someone else while going through what you went through. That isn't love, Bones. It's i_trauma/i_. If it was anyone else in the universe you'd be the first one to call them out on it."

"No." Len looks away from him, glaring at the comm unit as if it started this whole thing. "You've got no idea what we went through."

"Maybe not. But I'm not an idiot, Bones. I'll tell you what I do know: what you went through was horrible, and knowing that Chekov helped you get through it makes me the first person on the roster of his fan club. But the things that happened to you are fading."

He stands up, moving in to Len quietly, slowly, and his voice drops like he's soothing a cornered animal.

"You're not back to normal yet, but you'll get there. And to get there you've got to leave all the shit that happened behind you. When you recover from the cell and the aliens and the beatings, and your hands getting fucked up...when you get over all that, what's going to be left? You and Chekov...you don't have anything that didn't come from that cell. There's nothing between you that you aren't going to leave behind as you get better."

He reaches out, and for some reason Len doesn't shrug his hand off. He turns, even, faces Jim. Listens to him.

Jim meets his eyes, sad and irritated all at once. "I want you to be better, Bones. You've got to get past that planet, which means you've got to let go of everything that happened down there. Chekov is my kid, on my crew, and no one's going to fuck with him, not even me. But it drives me nuts to watch you two together, to think that for every step forward you take on your own, you step right back to where you were when that kid comes around."

Len opens his mouth to argue that, but words don't come. He draws in a breath, rasping and unsteady.

Jim swallows, the irritation dying down and the sadness taking over his face. "He was what you needed on that planet, Bones. Not now. I can't sit by and watch you finally let go of that cynicism of yours enough to love someone when I know it isn't really love at all. I wish I could, believe me. I wish it was real, because you deserve it more than anyone I've ever known."

"It is real," Len croaks in answer, and it sounds weak even to him.

Jim nods. "It's real, but it's not love."

Len wants to argue with that so badly that he can taste the words. But in the end the words don't come out.

In the end, he doesn't say anything at all.

* * *

He's way beyond paying attention when they grab him for the familiar haul down the corridor and back to Pavel and their cell.

In the back of his head he notes the differences: they have a much shorter trip this time. He noticed as they brought him in that they were using a room much closer to their cell than usual. But if there's a reason for that he doesn't know what it is.

He doesn't care.

He's going to die in these cold stone rooms. He doesn't care anymore. He's already dead, already crippled and useless and _done. _

It's his own fault. He said something at the very beginning, the very first beating. When he realized they were there to hurt him he said the first thing any doctor might think to say:

_Please, not my hands_.

The Speaker was there that first time, wearing the translator they brought down from the Enterprise, and he didn't acknowledge it but he must have heard and understood it.

Whatever the reason for the different room, there was also a different type of beating waiting for him. And now he's being dragged out with no fresh burns, no extra scars, no broken skin.

The only thing different now than when he was carried in are that his hands are gone.

Still attached, yeah. Technically they're still there. But they're gone. Demolished from the inside out. Everything they did to him was through his hands. Every scream they tore from him came from pain, yeah, but from more than that.

He can't feel them anymore - there's a numbness in his arms that seems to go from his elbows down, and it's probably a small mercy. He feels the weight of them making his arms hang down. But they're gone.

The guards drop him on the floor of his cell, and he doesn't move. He hears movement, hears a voice that he knows, but he can't focus on it.

He opens his eyes at one point and sees Pavel's face, wide-eyed and wild with relief that he doesn't understand. But he shuts his eyes again to make it go away.

He's dead. He's useless. He is nothing anymore. If he's got any hope at all it's that they take pity on him and make his death official.

* * *

Pavel leaves the mess hall behind, leaves Hikaru with his oversized dinner and the crowd of friends around him feigning interest in Hikaru's triumphant story about besting a simulator.

He appreciates it. Really. He knows why Hikaru takes him to that simulator every day, and why he pretends that every successful run is a triumph worth bragging about. He knows why Hikaru insists on dragging him out, to the rec rooms or the mess hall, to surround them with grinning friends and sympathetic listeners.

He doesn't need it, but he understands it.

He knew after the very first simulator run that he can do his old job. His mind hasn't shaken anything loose. It never does. He remembers what he needs to know, he can still map out the most complex star charts in his mind, plot courses through the most dangerous regions of space without pause.

He just doesn't want to.

Not yet. Not with Len still needing him. Not when half the time he wakes up unsure of where he is, that he feels the soft bed under him and the warmth around him and looks around his old quarters and is i_sure/i _it's an illusion.

Not when he can't be sure that anything around him is real until he runs through the corridors and straight to sickbay, to see Len there with him, sharing whatever new reality this is.

Every time Nurse Chapel walks into Len's room and sees Pavel there, she gets the same look on her face. _Still?_ And maybe she has a point - they've been back on the ship almost as long as they were in that cell. Maybe it's normal for everyone to get annoyed that they haven't gotten over it yet.

Maybe everyone ought to just mind their own business.

He is capable of leaving Len alone now. That is an improvement. He is able to eat without Len there - though he usually comms down to Len to make sure he doesn't need anything first, to make sure he isn't hungry.

Len is out of sickbay now, back in his own room. His hands are unwrapped, healing.

They are getting better. No, there wasn't some magical step they took, some revelation, some moment where they each realized that everyone else is right, that they need to let go of what happened, and each other, and get on with their lives. But just because that moment never happened doesn't mean they aren't better.

It's frustrating, this recovery. But the things that frustrate Pavel and Len aren't the things frustrating everyone else.

He finds himself walking towards Len's quarters as he thinks. There's nothing unusual in that, in drifting towards Len without making the conscious choice to, so he doesn't stop when he realizes where he's going.

It's hard to focus on things outside of Len. It's hard to pay much attention to the people walking the corridors around him, or at least hard to to care about them when he does focus.

When he sees someone coming towards him in the corridor, he glances at them and away again without the slightest amount of curiosity.

It's the same security officer who was waiting outside of sickbay before, but Pavel has seen him around before many times, there's no reason to think it means anything.

He doesn't remember the man's name, but he doubts many people do at all. Captain Kirk calls him a nickname, Cupcake, and so everybody calls him that. Pavel hasn't ever spoken to the man before, and there's no reason to now.

But the man slows as the distance between them shrinks, and when Pavel reaches him he stands still in the corridor. Not blacking his way, but standing deliberately enough for it to register with Pavel.

Pavel looks over at him, slowing so he can determine if this man is a threat, a barrier between he and Len somehow.

The guard just looks back at him. He seems...nervous, perhaps, or uncomfortable.

Pavel wonders suddenly if he was a friend to Lieutenant Desmarais. Perhaps he wants to ask about him, about how he died. Pavel knows nothing about it - he's paid callously little interest in the matter - but he will answer this man if he asks.

Instead the guard says something strange. "Are, uh...how you doing?"

Pavel blinks in surprise. "Excuse me?"

The guard, Cupcake, whatever his real name is, shrugs heavy shoulders. "Just asking. Everybody knows what happened down there, just figured..."

"I am not the one who was hurt," Pavel answers stiffly. Of course everybody knows, but he doesn't want to know that everybody knows.

He doesn't want to know that this man, whose name Pavel doesn't even know, has talked to other strangers about what happened on Maalox.

"Yeah," the security officer answers, uncertain. "I know. I mean, the doc...but that's why-"

"Cupcake. Stand down."

Pavel's eyes go past the officer and he sees Kirk himself, striding towards them with a half-smile on his face but an intent look in his eyes.

The officer turns back, sees Kirk. He stiffens, and Pavel doesn't think it's entirely from the approach of a superior officer.

Kirk grins at Pavel and gestures at Cupcake, the flap of a hand meant as dismissal. "I need to talk to the kid, get lost."

Cupcake turns without a single visible reaction and starts moving down the corridor again.

Pavel watches him go, brow furrowed.

"Hey, Chekov. Where you headed?"

He turns back to Kirk, though the question is silly and hardly needs an answer. "I was going to check on Len."

"Well, don't bother. He's with Chapel for some therapy. Look, we need to talk, okay?"

"What is his name?"

"What? Who?"

Pavel gestures back at the security guard, though he's turned a corner and is out of sight now. "That officer."

"Cupcake?" Kirk shrugs. "Harris, I think. Something Harris. Cupcake Harris." His grin fades abruptly. "Why? Did he say something to you?"

Pavel frowns back at Kirk. "No."

"Mm." Kirk looks back down the corridor. "If he does, you come talk to me. He's a good officer, but he's an asshole."

That description could match a lot of officers on this crew, but Pavel decides to let the matter drop. He faces Kirk. "What do we need to talk about, sir?"

Kirk turns back to him. "You, kid."

"What about me?"

Kirk hesitates, then slings an arm over Pavel's shoulder like they're friends and turns him around. "Come on, come with me. I told you," he says fast when Pavel opens his mouth to protest, "Bones isn't even home. Come on."

The words are friendly, the arm around his shoulder is friendly, but there's a note in Kirk's voice that says this isn't simply a friendly chat.

Pavel sighs to himself, but moves as Kirk leads him. They head down the corridor away from Len's quarters.

"Here's the deal, kid: you've been out of sickbay for almost two weeks now. You're working the simulator and that's a good thing, but we need to get you back on duty. So you tell me: is there anything you still need to get your ass back on the bridge? We can schedule you some sessions with Chapel, double up on your time in the simulators? You tell me, what's it gonna take to get you back in your uniform by this time next week?"

Pavel isn't surprised by this. In the back of his mind he knew it was coming. He is a Starfleet officer. As much as Kirk likes his crew to feel like one happy family, they are commissioned officers subject to guidelines.

He's thought about it lately, about putting his uniform on and taking the 'lift up to the Bridge, sitting at the helm beside Hikaru, doing his job.

It isn't a bad thought. He likes his job, he likes the Bridge. Some sense of his old life returning...that will be a good thing.

But he glances back as they walk, back towards Len's empty quarters. And in that look is his entire answer.

He can't give Kirk a laundry list of things he needs before he can settle back into being a navigator. None of the things that he needs have anything to do with him.

Kirk sighs suddenly, pulling them to a stop. He turns Pavel back to face him, and his eyes are solemn. Maybe he read Pavel's answer in that backwards look.

"Look, kid. Pavel." His hand lays heavy on Pavel's shoulder. "This isn't about both of you. It's about you. Bones is doing his own thing, he's on his path to getting better. You're helping with that, and I appreciate it." He hesitates.

Pavel faces him, hearing something coming, something grim. Something that makes him nervous.

"But," Kirk goes on. "If I get the sense that you helping him is slowing down your recovery - yours or his - then I'm going to put a stop to it. You can help him all you want to, but not at the expense of your own progress. And he can lean on you all he has to, but not if that means he's less able to recover because you're not there." His eyes are solemn, a rare thing for Captain Kirk. "I'm serious about this, Pavel. Things need to get back to normal around here, and normal isn't you and him joined at the hip."

Pavel nods once, terse. There's a cold feeling in his stomach, and he can't help but wonder how much Kirk is pushing Len about this.

Kirk studies him, sighs after a minute. "I'm not trying to be a bad guy here. But Bones is getting better, and it's time for you, for both of you, to get on with your lives."


	10. Chapter 10

"-and it's amazing, really, how often archaic solutions can work to fool modern technology."

Len doesn't move. Len lays on his back and looks out with half-shut eyes that probably aren't actually seeing anything.

Pavel keeps talking, because it's all he knows to do.

"I have conducted a few unofficial studies into the matter - one I even got Mr. Spock's assistance on. He finds it as interesting as I do, though his interest tends more towards the anthropological. He tends to focus on how societies with disparate technologies can coexist, and how the less evolved cultures aren't necessarily weaker."

He reaches over and takes a stale corner of dark, coarse bread. "Mine and Scotty's focus was always on the technological," he says as he holds the bread up to Len's mouth. "On how the most advanced computers can be fooled by methods so archaic that they're not even considered by the designers of that technology."

Len turns his mouth away from the touch of the bread.

Pavel sets the bread back on the plate. "It's a shame I never knew before how fascinated you are with outdated methods of medicine. You could have contributed, I think, to our discussions about technological advances and how limiting they can sometimes be."

If Len won't eat, it leaves Pavel with a free hand. He contemplates Len for a moment, the stiff line of his body - not his hands, Pavel can't even bring himself to look at the flattened and misshapen ruin of his hands - and decides that perhaps simple comfort is the best way to go.

So he slips his hand through Len's hair, the slow and easy stroke that he tends to fall back on when he's lost for any real ideas. Len doesn't move, doesn't acknowledge it. But it makes Pavel feel a little better.

"For example," he goes on, pretending that Len is paying the slightest bit of attention, "this building we are in. There are circuits around the ceilings, the entrances. I noticed when we were first brought in and assumed it was some sort of simplistic alarm system in case we or any of the other prisoners these rooms were built for escaped. But I've formed another theory through the last couple of weeks."

He pauses and then goes on as if Len asked him to, gave his semi-interested 'mmm?' or something of the sort.

"Well, we are still here. I have no doubt that the Enterprise is somewhere in orbit, looking for us. But they haven't found us yet. Since Kirk is our captain we can rule out that the delay is due to diplomatic efforts. He would never wait so long on something like diplomacy. And so I've decided that the wiring throughout this building serves another purpose: to jam our ship's sensors. To hide our presence here. It's the only thing that makes sense - the Enterprise is more than capable of detecting human life forms on a planet full of aliens, they should be here with phasers in hand to get us out."

Len turns his head again now that the food is safely gone. His eyes are slits, staring back up at the ceiling, at nothing.

Pavel swallows down a rising wave of emotion - pity or helplessness or despair, whichever it is that wants to escape now - and goes on speaking as calmly as he can manage.

"So you see how even the flagship of the Federation is stymied by something as rudimentary as sensor jammers. It is a prime example of the things Spock and I and Mr. Scott have discussed. He would find it fascinating. Spock. I have to say that I find it incredibly frustrating. If one of us could simply step outside of this building, the Enterprise would be able to detect us."

"Des..." Len swallows and rumbles with noise like a groan. "He's...outside."

"Des...Lieutenant Desmarais?" Pavel frowns at that, at the reminder of a man he should have thought much more about over the last weeks. "How do you know?"

"Told me. Buried him. A hundred..." Len licks his dry lips.

Pavel reaches for the water pitcher, removes his hand from Len's hair to pour a small bit into his palm.

Len accepts the water, though most of it slides down his chin. "Hundred other bodies outside. Prisoners. He's the first...alien." He rumbles, another groan of a chuckle.

Pavel nods, feeding him another handful of water. "I suppose I should have guessed." He frowns, blinking out at the wall as Len swallows a few more drops of water. "That is frustrating in quite another way."

"Mmm?"

He shakes his head - it's a heavy enough weight to know how easily they could be found if only he could get a message to the ship. He doesn't need to share that burden with Len.

Poor Desmarais should be a reminder, at least. Though things are horrid here, they are both still alive. That should count for something.

But he doesn't bother voicing that platitude either. Even without looking at Len's dead hands limp on the floor, he knows Len wouldn't find any comfort in the idea.

Len, he has little doubt, would switch places with Rene if he could.

* * *

He only tolerates her watching eyes for a few minutes before he speaks.

"You may as well come out with it."

Christine blinks at him, trying for innocence and failing spectacularly. "Out with what? Have you ever known me to censor myself around you?"

"Yeah," Len answers tersely. "Since the day I woke up here instead of on that planet."

Her innocent smile fades.

Len gestures his free hand at her, obediently continuing the monotonous task of squeezing a rubbery ball with his other hand. "Odds are Pavel's going to show up here. Get it out of your system before he's around to hear it."

She raises an eyebrow and smiles faintly. "Sounds to me like you've got a good idea of what I'm going to say already."

"You let Jim beat you to it," he confirms. He looks down at the little orange ball, watches his fingers tighten and release around it. Tighten and release. It's a really old-fashioned way of building up strength in the hand and wrist, though of course this ball has sensors and arrays that are feeding information to the computers with every squeeze, and that's relatively modern.

"He didn't do a bad job, either," he says when she doesn't take him up on the offer and start bitching. "Actually got me thinking about things."

"Oh yeah? Remind me to think about giving him a little credit for that."

But that's all she says. Len looks up at her after a moment, eyebrows raised.

She looks back at him, calm. "It's not my place to say anything."

"And that's ever stopped you before?"

She considers that. "There's a point. But it's stopping me now, Leonard. As long as you're thinking about it, I'm happy. You're too smart and too good a man to make the wrong choice, especially when the health of such a young man is at stake."

He blows out an annoyed breath and squeezes the ball.

An instant later his eyes fly back up to her and his hand goes slack. "Wait a damned minute here. The health of a young man? What are you talking about?"

She hesitates. "I thought you said the Captain already-"

"-gave me a speech about how hanging on to the kid is impeding my recovery, and everything between us comes from trauma, nothing more."

She frowns. "I see."

"You've got something to add now, I take it? You want to tell me how I'm hurting Pavel, because I don't see it."

"Jim is a good captain, but he's got a blind spot a mile wide whenever you're involved." Christine sits back, looking uncertain. "I'm not the ship's psychologist, but whatever gets said to me in that context is private all the same. You know I can't tell you about anything Ensign Chekov has said to me."

"Yeah," Len meets her eyes, firm. "But he sure as hell didn't tell you I was hurting him somehow. You can have your confidentiality, I know that kid."

She stays quiet for a moment, reaching out and taking the forgotten ball and holding it out across the table.

Len grabs it, annoyed, and squeezes the damned thing for all he's worth.

"Mr. Chekov hasn't told me anything," she says slowly. "He's made no complaints about your behavior."

"Of course not."

"And I'm not a clinical psychologist, as everyone seems fond of reminding me. But I know a few things, Len. I took the same courses you did, at least until our specialties changed our class loads. And I can tell you something that's generic enough that it doesn't threaten any kind of doctor/patient privilege: when a person is weighed down with guilt over someone else's pain, they have absolutely no choice when that Someone Else comes to them for help."

Len thinks about that, brow furrowing. "You're saying the kid is codependent?"

She frowns. "I'm speaking in generalities, Len. Generally speaking, a sense of guilt can be as hard to defy as a direct order. I'm saying that if someone takes on enough responsibility, the idea of free will loses its meaning."

So. She's not saying that Pavel's codependent, she's saying he's a slave to Len's needs.

Len snorts and looks back at the ball, at his hand.

He's known since they first woke up back on the ship that Pavel needs him as much as he needs Pavel. Maybe he didn't stop to think that neither of those needs are particularly healthy.

But Jesus. It's so fucking sick of Christine and Jim to be dissecting their behavior when they're only a few weeks out of a cell. How can they begin to tear apart Len and Pavel when Len and Pavel aren't anything like back to normal yet?

They talk like this is how things are now. Like things have settled into some harmful pattern that they want to rescue Len and Pavel from. But nothing is settled yet. It hasn't even begun.

Pavel was right. Of course he was right, the kid's a fucking genius. He knew that everyone around them would cast them as Survivors and monitor their recovery. That just because the scars were healing and his fingers could wrap around a ball he ought to be his old self again in all other ways.

"Len."

He glares up at Christine before he can school his expression.

She regards him, patient and calm in that way that's always made her such a good fit in his Sickbay.

"You can convince yourself that the entire universe outside of you and that kid are all wrong about something, but if it's two people against the universe than isn't there a better chance that it's the two people who are wrong?"

Len drops the ball back on the table, because if it stays in his hand it's going to get thrown.

"No one is claiming that you or Pavel are bad guys. Believe me, Len, I know you, and I know that kid wouldn't hurt a fly. But people can do things that are out of character when they're trying to survive something horrible, and you two are still in survival mode."

But he's not, he wants to argue. He's not leaning on Pavel the way he did in the cell. He doesn't fear everyone around him, he doesn't need Pavel to stand between him and the doorway anymore.

It isn't survival mode, it's just how things have changed because of the survival mode he was stuck in for so long.

The problem with the rest of the universe, he figures, is that what happens to two people doesn't affect that universe in the slightest. Sulu and his ironic Buddhist sayings can go on about the wings of a butterfly causing famine on Ganasus Prime, but the fact of the matter is that if Len and Pavel had died in that cell the universe would still be going on, inexorable as always.

The universe isn't affected by two people, so if the universe holds on to some fact that two people argue with...no, he's not inclined to say it's the two people who are wrong.

Maybe that's the problem: no one's wrong. The two people are just trying to recover, changed by something that didn't so much as register out in the universe.

Pavel told him once, in that cell, about some poem or something that he read. He talked about it after the Maalox fucked up Len's hands, after he lost his head, so the memory is unsteady. But Len remembers him talking about it.

The gist was that some guy's looking up at the stars, knowing that the small lives of he and every other human being don't affect those cold, distant stars in the slightest. But then he goes on to realize that if one of those stars suddenly extinguishes, he wouldn't even notice its passing. It would just be one less light among millions.

Len seems to remember that the justice of it was what Pavel seemed to like. There's truth to it, anyway, and Len thinks about it now, with Christine staring at him in quiet sympathy.

There is nothing so huge that the entire universe is affected by its happening. What happened to Len and Pavel might only affect the two of them, and so it's up to the two of them to decide what sort of impact it will have, and how they need to react to it.

Maybe Pavel is a textbook case of guilt-induced codependency. Maybe Len's a classic case of trauma, of unhealthy attachment. But textbooks are as cold and distant as stars, and they're not suitable judges.

Then again.

Jim and Christine aren't textbooks. They're not spokesman for the bigger universe. They are friends. They were affected by what happened. Not as directly as Len and Pavel, but affected all the same.

So he can't ignore them as easily as he wants to.

And he can't deny that he's not exactly impartial. Jim is probably right: if he were the doctor in this situation instead of the patient, he might feel as doubtful as Jim that Pavel knows what he's talking about when he says 'love'. If he were in Christine's shoes he might wonder if some harm was being done to Pavel, being leaned on so heavily when guilt is already weighing him down so hard.

Maybe, in the end, it's Christine and Jim who are right. Maybe they're just close enough and just far enough away that they can see something horribly obvious that Len is just too fucked up to notice.

* * *

He lays there...he doesn't know how long. Time is this weird tunnel around him, gray and illusory. He might pass out, might fall asleep, might be awake, but it's all this same painful black blur that he can't grasp on to.

His hands are gone. He can hardly force his eyes to open, can hardly emerge from this weight that has settled all around him.

There's a voice above his head, that's how he knows he isn't with Them. The rise and fall of quickly-spoken words have faded, with the hours and the passing out and the waking up, into a slower kind of monotone, but Len doesn't mind. As long as he hears the sound of it, as long as he knows he's with Him and not with Them, he isn't inclined to be picky.

He just wants this to be over. His hands are gone, his life is shot. They take him out to hurt him, to make him scream and watch him cry and hear him beg, and then they put him back in this...i_stasis/i _chamber, like he's being preserved for the next round.

It's beaten him. He can't do it. This pain, this fear, this dread of what else they'll do now that they've done the worst thing they can...it's won.

He can't focus on Pavel, and in the back of his mind he almost feels sorry for the kid. If Len's mind is gone that means the kid is all alone here, and that's probably a scary thing.

The next time he hears the screeching grind of the door opening, he can't even manage a reaction. How can hurt him badly enough that he'll even feel it anymore? Why should he be scared?

The only worse thing they can do now is kill him, and he's almost rooting for it.

He is rooting for it.

Or maybe he's just telling himself that, because when heavy footsteps come in he shuts his eyes and thinks, in a startlingly lucid, loud voice, _take Pavel._

_Take the kid. He's still healthy, he'll scream when you hurt him. I can't anymore. He'd be more fun, take him. Please, please take him instead. _

He thinks it, and he means it, and for a few ticks of breath he can't even feel guilty for it.

But before they can come close enough to grab him, the droning voice Len has been holding on to for hours suddenly chokes off, and the pillow slides itself from under Len's head.

"No."

That same voice, only not a monotone anymore. Loud, and firm.

"You're not going to touch him."

Len's eyes open. His vision is cloudy and he's so fucking tired he can't make his eyes focus, but he can see Pavel standing there, standing over him.

He can see the oversized gray lumps of the Maalox facing him,

Pavel speaks again, clear and strong. "You have done enough, you're not taking him again."

The Maalox hiss and click in their ugly language. One of them strides forward and simply pushes Pavel away.

The kid stumbles against the wall, catching himself on his hands, and the Maalox move to Len.

"I said no, _merzavci_! Don't touch him!"

Pavel pushes off the wall and plows into one of them. He barely makes the broad Maalox stumble.

Len shuts his eyes hard for a moment, forcing them to focus. He tries to push himself to sit up, but with his arms completely useless he can't manage it.

He watches, though, from his awkward spot on the floor. He watches Pavel growl and yell and fling his thin little self at the guards like a shaft of wheat grass that wind sends batting into a tree trunk.

The Maalox mutter between themselves, and one of them comes around to grab Pavel by the arm and throw him a little more forcefully into the wall.

Len knows it's useless. The kid could never fight them off, and they've been so focused on Len this whole time that he can't make himself believe they'd suddenly switch to using Pavel as a punching bag instead of him.

But he watches, because Pavel is fighting for him. It's what he tried to avoid at first, when he still thought there was a chance they would go for the kid. It's what his brain has been crying out for for days, though he doesn't want to admit that.

And as he watches he knows it's useless. He might want the kid to demand to go in his place, but the Maalox aren't going to go for it.

He might want someone, _any_one, to suffer instead of him, but...

But he doesn't want this. He doesn't want it to be Pavel.

The guard barks something at Pavel, some command, some order to stay back or knock it off. When the guard turns back to Len, Len ignores him.

He watches Pavel push himself off the wall a second time, watches him move on unsteady feet to the abandoned platter of molding greens. Watches the kid pick up that platter and hurl it at the guard's back.

That _does _get a reaction. The guard lets out a sound that would have made Len laugh any other time - it's kind of like the indignant sound Jim makes when someone turns him down at a bar.

The guard wheels and scrapes a soggy mass of leaves off his sleeve and shoulder and stares at it.

The other guard makes a rumbling sound that Len pegs as laughter, and he moves to his pal's side. They go back and forth for a minute in their always hurried-sounding language.

And then, abruptly, they both head for the door.

Len's head tilts up, lifting off the floor in shock as they go. The door squeals shut behind them.

They're gone.

Len's eyes go to Pavel, who stands there against the wall with fists clenched, breathing hard, looking wild and ragged and just as surprised as Len feels.

He can't take his eyes off the kid as Pavel moves, stumbling over to Len and dropping down on his knees, graceless and heavy.

"I should..." Pavel stares from Len to the door, and his eyes are huge. "I should have fought them. Every time."

Len swallows. He hasn't spoken in days but words come up that want to be said.

Pavel doesn't let him. He sinks down, a hand reaching out limply and falling on Len's leg. "I will. From now on, I swear."

"Kid..." is all Len gets out, and his voice is rusty as a nail.

Pavel breathes in and out, deep, like he's a step away from bursting into tears. He stares at the closed door.

He won't stop them even if he fights them. This...Len wants to be hopeful but he can't, he knows this is a fluke. They were surprised, and the food, and they won't let something like that deter them again.

If Pavel fights he'll just get himself hurt. Len wants to tell him that, wants to go back to the old self-sacrificial Saint McCoy he was when he landed in this cell however long ago.

But as little as he wants to see Pavel hurt, there's something about having this kid fight for him that has cleared some of the cotton from Len's mind. There's something about a thrown platter of food that has lifted some of the heaviness of despair from him.

Hell if he knows why, but he feels like he can hold on to the feeling. He feels like there's a part of him that's still worth walking out of here alive, no matter what else they do.

Pavel recovers from his own shock slowly, twists himself back under Len, the ever-faithful pillow, and slowly his voice starts up again, revving slowly into some story about one of his old school mates from Russia.

Len doesn't focus on the words - his coherent patches are too unreliable to bother - but he shuts his eyes and rests against Pavel's lap and lets the sound of Pavel's voice drift down to him, constant and soothing.

* * *

"Don't you ever knock?"

Pavel stops in the doorway, caught by surprise.

He walked through the door without pause, yes, without asking for entry or receiving permission. But it's nothing he hasn't done a dozen times in the last week.

Len looks back at him, sitting in his armchair with a padd on his lap - still catching up on the medical journals, no doubt. He is scowling.

Pavel isn't thrown off by the scowl, but the greeting has him lost for an answer.

Len looks down at the padd, his scowl easing.

"How's the training going?" he asks after a moment, soft, like an apology.

"It..." Pavel hesitates. He steps in far enough that the door can slide shut behind him, but stops there.

He hasn't had to think about this, this understanding that he simply has access to Len wherever he is. He has taken it as a given that he and Len...that they should stay close. Of course others have tried to prevent it, to bar him from seeing Len, but those are outside obstacles that he fights without thought.

He is instantly and entirely thrown off, having this form of objection, of stipulation, coming from Len himself.

"It is redundant," he says after a moment. It's easy to make himself talk, he's gotten so used to it that silence feels unnatural.

He studies Len, confused and uncertain, even as he answers. "We run through exercises that any first year student at the Academy could complete. But Hikaru insists, and if I refuse they will want me to resume my duty shifts."

Len stares at the padd. "Yeah, well, that's not a crazy idea. You're okay, you should get back to work." He doesn't move, doesn't look at him. His voice is flat when he speaks. "You belong on the bridge, kid. I'm sure as hell going to get my ass back into sickbay as soon as they let me."

The implication, as Pavel hears it, is that Pavel doesn't belong here. Not in this quarters, not without knocking.

Pavel is lost for a response.

He has only stalled resuming his shifts because he has to be here for Len. He thought that was understood. He thought Len knew.

"For Christ's sake, stop looking at me like that." Len stares at his padd. "I'm not kicking you out, I'm just saying. Things need to...they've got to go back to normal."

And this isn't normal. It isn't how things used to be.

With that thought, Pavel understands.

He lets out a relieved breath, trying to calm his own nerves, and moves further into the room. He slips around the narrow coffee table, not scared anymore.

Len's gaze slides to him as he approaches, but moves away again. "Hey, kid, I'm serious. We should talk, okay? It's not-"

"We will talk," Pavel answers simply, "when you begin to speak your own words, and not Captain Kirk's."

Len tenses, and Pavel knows that he's right. The captain _has _been talking to Len, telling him the sort of things he was telling Pavel earlier.

Pavel sits, not waiting for invitation because this is Len, and he doesn't need invitation. He sits on the overstuffed arm of Len's chair, reaching out and slipping his fingers through Len's hair as he nods at the padd.

"What is your research today?"

Len hesitates, and Pavel lets him. He lets Len battle this out in his own mind, struggling against whatever fears and doubts Kirk has implanted in him.

With a small, almost frustrated sound, Len relaxes back and leans into Pavel's touch. He sighs out a breath, the tension sliding off of him.

"Some Andorian researcher thinks he's got a vaccine for Crain-Patlok Syndrome," he says, sounding much more like himself.

Pavel smiles. "And you think he does not."

"There's three different papers in this frigging journal about it, and they're all ignoring the basic and not-unimportant fact that vaccines only work if a body's cells can identify and remember the pathogens that cause a disease, and Crain-Patlok is incurable so far precisely because it mutates so radically so quickly." Len grabs the padd and drops it on the coffee table with a growl. "Idiots think one successful course of tests means a damned thing. First time the virus mutates the vaccine will fail."

"Do you want me to go away?" He asks the question now because if he doesn't he might grow too scared of it. And Pavel hates leaving things unsaid.

Len looks up at him. "What?"

Pavel regards him, steady. "Do you wish me to knock before I enter? To spend less time here? To go back to the old times, when I would see you for physicals and perhaps at meals, and never speak to you?"

Len's throat works.

"Is that what you want?" Pavel studies him.

"No." The word comes out hoarse, like it clawed its way from Len's throat. But he shakes his head and says it again more naturally. "No. But maybe what I want isn't the most important thing here."

Pavel considers that. "Maybe not. In fact..." His throat works, but hopefully his nervousness doesn't show through.

Pavel is still himself even after everything they have gone through: it's simply not his way to put off an important matter, to get caught up in idle distraction.

They have to deal with this, with Kirk and Chapel and all the people who stare at them as if they're permanently marked by the Maalox. Pavel has to know that another conversation with Jim isn't going to change Len's mind again.

So he looks at Len steadily, though he's entirely out of his depth and pushing something he doesn't want to risk.

"In fact," he keeps going more calmly than he feels, "what you want is definitely not the most important thing here."

His own mind calls him a liar. But he has a point to make here, and sometimes lying is acceptable.

He stands up, slipping his fingers free of Len's hair, and moves around the coffee table to Len's small replimat.

"Do you remember when you said to me that my being hurt wasn't an acceptable alternative to your being hurt?"

Len sounds wary. "It's the truth, kid."

"It is your truth," Pavel agrees. He programs himself a cup of tea from the replimat, and then a coffee for Len. "And that is why your opinion, and what you want, aren't the most important things right now. Because you made your opinion the most important thing in that cell, and so...it is my turn to be most important now."

He turns back to Len, cups in hand.

Len's eyebrows are raised. He accepts the coffee silently.

Pavel moves back around the table but sits on the couch instead of giving in to his constant desire to be as close to Len as possible.

"You said that it was unacceptable for you to let them hurt me, because it isn't your wish to see harm done to anyone. The implication, Len, is that you think I am perfectly content watching someone else get hurt instead of me."

Len blinks in surprise. He leans in and sets the coffee on the table beside his glowing padd. "I never said anything like that."

"It is harder for you to watch someone suffer than to suffer yourself. What you chose..." Pavel looks away from Len's eyes, because it's against his overdeveloped instincts towards Len to want to accuse him of anything.

"What you chose was selfish. You made my choice for me, because it was the easiest choice for you." He draws in a breath. "You didn't want to watch an innocent suffering. And so you forced me to have to watch an innocent suffering. It was selfish, Len. It was good and noble and unbelievably brave...and it was selfish."

He can't lose Len. He can't let this ship and Kirk and the gossip and recovery take Len from him. He can't let Len cast him aside because Len thinks it's best.

He can't let Len make his choice for him this time.

Pavel grasps his steaming tea cup, though it is uncomfortably hot against his fingers. "And so," he says to his cup, "I think it is my turn to be selfish. I think that right now, what _I_ want is most important."

"So what do you want?"

Pavel looks over at Len.

Len's mouth is tilted upwards. Not enough to call it a full smile, but enough that Pavel can sigh out a little of his worry.

"I want us to go on as we need to," he says carefully. "Not the way that others think we ought to. I don't think it's asking too much, really."

"Sure doesn't sound like it." Len leans in and holds out his hand.

Pavel smiles, prying his hand from his cup and reaching out, accepting the grasp as a peace offering. "Besides," he says more cheerfully now that Len is back to himself, "I love you. I shouldn't have to knock on your door."

Len chuckles and squeezes Pavel's hand.

But as he does, Pavel sees something troubled swirling again behind his eyes. Len doesn't say anything, doesn't withdraw, doesn't lower his gaze. But there is something behind his expression.

Something that tells Pavel that this is far from settled.


	11. Chapter 11

Of course Pavel can't fight them off, not really.

The first time he tries they leave, yes, but the second time, and every time after that, they silence him with a punch of their fist, or they throw him out of the way against a wall and plant a foot in his stomach.

He's too weak. Sometimes he can lift himself up after a hit, mostly he can't. Mostly he lays there and spits curses at them as they take Len away.

The worst thing isn't watching them go, though. It's knowing that even though he's so easily defeated, he is trying, and he wasted so many chances to try before. Back when he had strength, when he and Len were still new to this cell and still had some sense of the outside world inside them, he could have fought harder.

He should have fought at all.

Len eats more now. Pavel doesn't know if it's because of his fighting - he doubts it: he is, after all, unsuccessful - but it's a good thing. After the monsters hurt his hands so much he seemed to have given up entirely.

He talks again now, a little bit, but he doesn't seem to like to. Perhaps it hurts him. He must wear his throat out when they take him out of there. They must make him scream so often...

Pavel is finding it harder to keep his thoughts steady here. He finds it hard to talk about his old life, his studies and his stars, his family. He finds he can't focus on any one thing for long, that when Len is gone his mind drifts around, aimless, unable to concentrate.

Molecular diffusion without concentration gradient. Maybe someday he'll propose a study to see if a man's thoughts can spread out in seemingly random ways until they fill up the whole of an empty space. If diffusion can exist inside a mind, in the subject of one's thoughts.

The more the world seems silent and endless around him, the more uniformly his thoughts diffuse. There must be a theory regarding this sort of thing. Everything in the universe is simply scientific theory put to action. Even his useless, tedious mind-wanderings.

Perhaps he's going a little bit crazy.

Ockham's razor would suggest this as the more likely possibility, but Pavel enjoys convolution in his theories. Simplicity isn't preferable when one has days and weeks of nothing but time and silence to fill.

"I know that one."

The voice is so soft that Pavel is halfway through his next thought before he registers it. He trails off, realizing that he isn't _thinking_ such scattered thoughts about Ockham's razor, he is speaking them aloud.

"What?"

Len grimaces around the leaf he's chewing on, pressed into his mouth by a scattered but still overanxious Pavel's fingers. "Said I know that one. Ockham."

Pavel nods. "I find it a good theory to keep in the back of my mind, but I think it's a mistake to assume the simplest answer is correct."

"Always wondered why..." Len swallows. He draws in a ragged breath.

Pavel can almost hear the wind rattling in his throat. He reaches for the water pitcher and pours a palmful.

Len slurps from his hand slowly and sinks back. "Why d'they call it 'razor'?"

Pavel takes an absent sip of water himself and sets the pitcher down. He slips his damp hand back through Len's hair. "Because philosophers think they're clever."

"Mmm?"

Pavel has to look out at the wall, to ignore the shuddering in Len's body that he can feel through his legs. He can't look at Len's limp, flat, horrible hands. He can't think of it.

His thoughts _have _to diffuse into scattered miscellany, because he simply has no outlet for his reactions to what is actually happening around him.

"Because philosophy," he says, swallowing, tilting his head against the wall and looking up at the dark ceiling, "tends to lay theory on top of theory on top of motive and moral and nature and nurture. Most philosophical theory, in my opinion, makes such a convoluted mess of things that hearing a philosopher explaining something is worse than hearing some old, intractable Lovelace supporter justifying the existence of twenty-two extra dimensions in space-time, neatly folded and tucked away just so they can grasp on to worn out bosonic string theory as if it hasn't been _conclusively _disproved by the Barovski-Melek constructs over a hundred _years_ ago."

There is silence.

He looks down at Len and sees a flash of something like amusement underneath his shadowed eyes.

"Sorry." He offers a wan smile. "It...when a theory actually makes things simpler instead of more complex and layered, the theory tends to be called a 'razor'. Because it shaves away the unnecessary."

Len's mouth quirks.

Pavel sighs and looks up again. It scares him to hear himself ramble on that way. He means to fill the silences, yes, to serve as a distraction for Len however he can, but when he falls too hard into the role, when he talks in fragmented sentences about randomness he can't control, it worries him.

His mind is the only thing he has. He can't let it be scattered and lost.

His fingers slip through Len's hair, again and again. "Tell me something now. Something about medicine, or the south, or your daughter."

"Told you everything," Len says in that soft rasp of his. "You talk."

Pavel shakes head, unnerved and not sure why. "I talk too much."

"I need it."

Those words draw Pavel's focus instantly. He looks down at Len sharply. "You..."

Len looks up at him for a moment before his eyes slide shut again. "My whole world...it's either hell or its you. If I hear you talking I know which one it is."

"I..." Pavel shuts blurring eyes, not focusing on the dampness when he blinks. "I don't know what to say anymore."

Len doesn't answer, but his mouth creases and his silence is resigned.

Pavel swallows his uncertainty and tries to forget his fear that his mind is slipping away from him in this unchanging room.

"But of course you ought to hear why the archaic ideas behind bosonic string theory are still held on to so tightly in some scientific circles. And to explain that properly I have to go back at least three thousand years, through an entire crowd of physicists and their entire body of experimentation."

Len relaxes minutely, though his eyes stay shut and he doesn't speak.

He listens, and he needs it.

So Pavel talks.

* * *

"Do you think it's wrong..."

Len hesitates, shutting his mouth, annoyed, over the trailed-off words. He frowns down at the steaming bowl he's been stirring for the last five minutes.

The soft sound of a throat clearing grabs his attention again. "Do you find the meal distasteful?"

Len looks up, flashes a wan grin at Spock. "Never thought I'd say this, but it's actually pretty good."

Spock's expression doesn't alter from the mild curiosity he's worn almost all evening. "You were more prepared to doom the entire library of Vulcan cuisine as bad?"

Len's smile is a little more genuine at that. "Grandmama McCoy always warned me not to trust a vegetarian."

"So the desire to masticate and digest pieces of flesh adds to one's trustworthiness. I see." Spock studies him. "Do I think what is wrong?"

Len's grin fades. He looks back at his soup - _ulan_, Spock called it. Kinda reminds him of a less sour version of this seafood soup Joce used to get from some Thai place near their home back in Atlanta a lifetime ago.

None of which is distracting enough to make him forget his darker thoughts.

"Jim figures things ought to be back to normal by now," he says slowly. "And when he says it I figure he's right. But they're not normal. Not for me, not for Pavel. They're not even close."

"You're asking if I think that is wrong?" Spock frowns thoughtfully across the table. "There isn't a set time limit on recovery from traumatic-"

"I'm a fucking grown man, Spock!" The words fly out before he can stop them. "I'm a doctor, I've had a divorce and a kid and lived a few more than thirty years already. And I don't feel safe unless there's a skinny little Russian kid standing between me and the world. How the fuck is that normal?"

"Ah." Spock falls silent.

Len stares down at his soup again, his face heating. Okay, he didn't mean to actually come out and tell Spock that he's using Pavel as a security blanket, but hell. There it is. Spock won't judge him for it the way Jim does, he won't take notes and psychoanalyze it like Christine.

And Len's got to have one person who isn't Pavel who will shut up and listen to him talk about this without looking at him like a battle-scarred psycho.

He speaks again to break the silence, his voice annoyingly soft. "It's unnatural. Leaning on some kid for any sense of security, or comfort."

"Forgive me, Leonard, but you're either giving yourself far too much credit or giving Ensign Chekov far too little."

Len blinks up at him, scowling half-assedly. "The hell is that supposed to mean?"

Spock sits back, setting his spoon down carefully and surveying Len over the table. "Vulcans are a stronger, sturdier race than humans. We live longer, we age more slowly, we are capable of enduring extremes that human bodies can not manage. I am of course only half Vulcan, but I am made aware regularly of the differences between me and the humans I serve with."

Any other time, any _normal _time, Len would've cut him off and snorted half a dozen comments about green-blooded braggarts by now. He doesn't, but he does gesture to cut off this little speech.

"And that's got something to do with what I'm talking about?"

Spock cocks up an eyebrow minutely. "Nyota is a child in comparison to me. She is worryingly frail if compared to a Vulcan female of my own age. And yet, Leonard, I have never once hesitated to rely on her when I am in need, and I have never feared doing so. To say that because she is younger or more fragile than me she is somehow weak, or incapable? That would be an insult to her that she has proven to be untrue time and again."

Len takes that in, frowning. "I'm not insulting Pavel by saying that I shouldn't have to lean on him the way I still do."

"Forgive me, perhaps the insult is in implication only." Spock calmly sips his soup. "You are, after all, an intelligent man. Only an unintelligent man with a grossly inflated sense of pride would think that he will never need rely on anyone. Only an unintelligent man would accept that he needs help yet chafe over the trivial matters of age and experience when considering the person who can best offer that help."

Len scowls, dropping his spoon on the table. "You talk so god damned much."

Spock considers that. He takes another spoonful of soup.

"You really don't see anything wrong with how things are turning out? Because you'd be the only one on the fucking ship who doesn't."

"It wouldn't be the first time I've been accused of holding an unpopular opinion." Spock looks across the table at Len, his expression as placid as ever. "But how many on board this ship have been where you are now?"

For a moment Len wants to be impressed that of everyone he's dealt with lately, Spock is the one with the open mind

But his conscience can't let him rest on that. He _knows _that there's something wrong here. Everyone thinks it, it must be true.

He looks out at Spock, challenging, and throws out the words that seem to have upset Jim most.

"He says he loves me."

The words are hard, like an accusation.

Spock blinks. "Congratulations, then. The Ensign is a remarkably intelligent and accomplished man for his age. He will be a fascinating partner to have, I should think."

"God damn it, Spock." Len pushes his bowl of soup away, exasperated. "Nobody, especially not a genius kid with any common sense, watches somebody get their ass kicked repeatedly and thinks 'yeah, I want some of _that_.' He doesn't love me, not because of what happened down on Maalox. It's ridiculous."

"I do wish you had the ability to engage in conversation without indulging in wild exaggeration. Honestly, Leonard."

Len glares at him, and as much as he's trying for the usual old aggravation, there's something wild in him that probably shows on his face.

He's not sure anymore if he's looking for someone to support him, or looking for a last nail in the coffin to tell him that Jim and Christine are right. That this is wrong and ridiculous and unhealthy.

He doesn't know how much emotion someone like Spock can sort out and label from the look on someone's face, but Spock doesn't seem to grow any more solemn now.

"Why would you assume," Spock asks, mild, "that his feelings came because of what happened? Perhaps he loves you _despite_ what happened. Perhaps it has absolutely nothing to do with the Maalox."

"It can't have nothing to do with it," Len answers automatically. "Everything in our fucking universe right now revolves around that planet."

Spock doesn't argue that. "You ought to give the ensign more credit, Leonard. I have worked closely with him on several different projects. He isn't a boy given to outpourings of emotion. He would not speak words without having analyzed them in his mind already. He isn't driven by instinct as many humans are. He prefers to approach things from a place of thought, of rationality and consideration."

He leans in, his eyebrows arched up and something almost dark swirling behind his eyes. "The only way an outsider such as myself, or the Captain, could state with certainty that anything between you and Chekov is wrong is if we know it is dishonest. If you don't return Chekov's feelings..." There's just enough pause there to seem dangerous. "If you find yourself speaking or acting against your better judgment to indulge those feelings, then what's happening in your recovery is indeed wrong. If not...none are qualified to judge, save you and Pavel."

It's a strong answer. Stronger than he was expecting Spock to give. But Len sits back in his chair and frowns out at the room beyond, and doesn't feel much more settled than he did when he came in.

"Leonard."

He drags his eyes back to Spock.

Spock studies him. "I am quite comfortable with Ensign Chekov. We work closely enough together than I feel more comfortable discussing his personality than I would with most of the crew. I consider you and Jim to be my closest friends on the ship, and of course I know Nyota better than most any other humans, but Pavel is familiar to me in a way that most of you aren't."

"Spock." Len frowns. "Is this your way of telling me not to hurt him or I'll be sorry?"

His eyebrow does another quick shift and arch, and Spock's mouth quirks faintly. "It is my way of saying that you ought not underestimate him. He was strong enough to survive the planet, of course he was smart enough and calm enough to lead us to you to enact rescue. You are a man of faith, Leonard, you always have been. Have some faith in him. And in yourself."

Len's frown eases. He looks down at the table, at the half-empty bowl of soup.

And yeah, maybe that worked. Maybe he does feel a little better now than when he came in.

His gaze comes up after a moment, as Spock's words settle in his mind. "What do you mean, 'lead us to you'?

"You do know, I assume, that if it wasn't for Pavel the Captain would most likely still be searching for you. He is the reason you were rescued as quickly as you were."

Len frowns.

He sure as hell didn't know that.

* * *

"I want to talk to them."

"Jim..."

He ignores the warning voice behind him, though this time this particular warning comes from a man who outranks him. He keeps his eyes on the vidscreen, acting as if he's still in charge of the situation.

The Speaker hasn't responded, so Jim stares at him all the more intently.

"If you want this talk to proceed any further, I want to see my men."

The Speaker looks past Jim. When he speaks his voice sounds a little strained, though Jim's not the best judge of Maalox physiology and vocal response.

"We do not deal with this man any longer. This request does not come from ranking official," the Speaker says through the translator that Nyota works for hours a day to improve for the sake of negotiations.

Jim's throat works, but the bastard is right. This isn't Jim's show anymore. They didn't make enough progress, they didn't find Bones in time, and Jim has lost his authority.

He turns and regards Pike, trying to be calm. "The last I saw my officers was on the transporter pad heading down to the surface. The last I heard from them was a transmission reporting on the progress of the mission. I have absolutely no evidence that after that transmission two _weeks _ago that they are even alive."

Pike looks from Jim to the viewscreen calmly.

Jim keeps going, trying to keep his voice level. "We only have the Maalox' side of what happened, and they have been vague on the details to the point of hampering these negotiations. If they don't want to tell us what our officers did that was so offensive, fine. But given how little we know about this race, and how little they will tell us about that crime, we can't begin to guess at what they might consider as proper punishment."

He looks past Pike at Spock, who stands calmly behind Pike's chair, hands folded behind his back. But when he meets Jim's eyes he gives a small, terse nod.

Jim looks back at Pike, confident. "We might have wasted two weeks now negotiating for the return of dead men. I see absolutely no need to continue these talks unless they can provide some proof that my officers are still alive."

Pike's eyes flicker from Jim back to the viewscreen. He hesitates, and Jim knows he's thinking of Barnett and the other Fleet diplomats safely bunked and waiting for the official negotiations to continue in the morning.

Spock speaks calmly after a moment. "Considering that you are spending most of the negotiation period settling small details of concessions that would be entirely moot should the officers prove to be dead, it seems a logical request, admiral."

Pike considers that. He turns a last hiked eyebrow to Jim, a clear 'thanks for making sure I was the one saddled with this decision, you punk' look that almost makes Jim smile, because it's obviously agreement.

Pike looks back at the viewscreen. "I am a ranking official, I'll make the request: show us some proof that our officers are alive."

The Speaker turns away from the screen and to a small group of other Maalox. They talk in quick, whispered bursts that the translator doesn't pick up.

Jim flashes a look at Pike, thankful all over again that he's still new enough to the admiralty that he still thinks like a normal person.

The talk between the Maalox seems to grow more heated, and Jim's smile fades as he watches it.

They're not happy. Obviously, really unhappy about this request. And he can think of one good reason why they wouldn't be happy.

He hasn't let himself think about it much - they have always been so imperious about negotiating, about Starfleet sending down new doctors, about how they deserve concessions. Jim understood that to mean that Bones and the others were still alive. They had to be, otherwise the Maalox have no leg to stand on.

But this makes him go cold all over. Watching the Speaker hissing so unhappily with his men puts a bucket of ice down Jim's spine.

Jesus. They might really be dead.

He can't say anything, can't let his face slip from it's confident stare. But his hands fist at his sides and his breathing is a little bit faster than it was.

The Speaker turns back after a few minutes more and glares out at them. "You can not see them," he says.

It's going to take a hell of a good argument to keep Jim from hauling ass down to the transporter room and appearing beside this guy so he can fucking choke him to death.

But the Speaker isn't done. "They remain where they are. We will not allow them to be moved. But we will let you speak to one of them."

Spock makes a quite, thoughtful sound behind him, and Jim knows what he's thinking - Spock has formed a theory that the reason their sensors can't pick up any human life-signs on that planet is because they have a way to block the sensors. But the block the sensors from picking up humans they'd have to block the sensors from picking up all lifeforms - they haven't had contact with humans before, after all, and their not technologically sophisticated enough to have developed a specific block so soon.

But there are no obvious dead patches on the planet, no spaces where all life-signs are inaccessible to the ship. Spock has been formulating a theory that whatever sensors they have are small, perhaps even limited to individual rooms or buildings.

This answer makes Jim think he's right. They don't want to move his men because for a time they would be outside the blocked areas, subject to being detected by the ship and located.

It's good, that they are allowing them some contact, but if Spock's theory is correct it means that the ship has absolutely no chance of finding Bones, Chekov and Desmarais on its own. It means that their only hope lies in negotiations.

It's about fifteen long, silent, tense minutes later when the Speaker finally turns back to the viewscreen and speaks.

"We will open a channel, Admiral."

Pike nods once, terse.

Jim looks out at his crew, at Nyota sitting back at her station, twisted to watch the screen with huge eyes. Hikaru sitting statue-still at the helm beside Fischer, the replacement sitting where Chekov should be.

They've held up without complaint, worked long, dull hours so that they hear any news instantly. It's getting to them, all of them, and Jim can't help but hope that something good comes of this.

There is a burst of interference static, and a small, confused voice echoes through the Speaker's room and leaks onto the bridge.

"_Hello?"_

Jim wants to look back at Hikaru - he hears the smallest sound come from him and he wants to turn, to go over, to stand with him. But he doesn't move.

He can't. If he even looks back, Hikaru will see his disappointment that it isn't Bones.

He speaks a moment later when Pike stays silent, obviously leaving it to Jim to talk to his officer. "Ensign Chekov, it's good to hear your voice."

_"Captain?" _Chekov sounds utterly baffled, hoarse and frail, like his voice will blow away at the slightest disruption. Whatever the Maalox said when they hauled him to whatever communicator they're using, they obviously didn't make it clear to the kid what was happening.

"Pavel." Jim swallows a little - he'd almost forgotten that accent, the pitch of his too-young voice. He really fucking wishes it was Bones he was hearing, but he'll take Pavel without complaint. "How are you and the others doing?"

There's a pause.

When Chekov speaks his voice is quick, wavering but firm. He rushes out words like he needs to say them all while he can. "_We are both alive. You are looking for us? Look for Bones. Spock must look for the _taphos._ You can see it if you can't see us._"

Jim blinks, glances back at Spock.

Spock looks back at him, impassive, not the slightest curiosity or confusion on his face.

Jim turns back to the viewscreeen.

But the Speaker has been watching, and just that one glance back must have been warning to him. Pavel's voice cuts off and the white noise of static dies away.

The Speaker regards them, grumbling an answer. "You are satisfied? For this allowance we will be seeking more than we have before."

Pike answers smoothly. "We'll leave that until the morning, then, Speaker, when all of our diplomatic team is ready to hear your demands."

The Speaker nods, already turning to his cohorts as the screen goes black. Probably to double-check what Pavel said.

Jim turns to Spock instantly. "What the hell was that?"

Spock is in motion just as quickly, the moment the Speaker is gone from the screen. Long strides take him back to the science station even as he answers.

"The Ensign said that they were 'both' alive. There were three men on the away team."

Jim nods grimly. "I picked up on that. Why would he tell us to look for Bones specifically? Is he...is he saying that Bones is..."

Fuck him, he's a captain in the middle of a fierce negotiation, and he still can't finish a sentence that even implies Bones is dead.

Spock sits down at his station and his fingers are a blur over the panels. "He said to look for the _taphos_. It is a Greek word for grave, or tomb."

Jim closes the space to his station slowly. "Then Bones is-"

"Captain." Spock shoots him a look, but it's softer than his terse voice implies. "You are the only one who refers to Doctor McCoy as Bones. I believe he was speaking of bones in the general sense."

Jim lets out a breath.

Spock regards him for a moment, his eyes uncharacteristically gentle, but turns back to his station. "I believe the ensign was giving us a rather important clue to find them on our own. Taphology is a branch of science named for _taphos_. It is the study of decomposition. The ensign has already told us that there are only two of them alive."

Jim has a sense of where this is going, but he waits.

Spock's hands fly over the panel, flashing screen after screen on the viewer in front of him.

Jim takes a moment during the pause to look back, to take in his bridge.

Pike has wheeled about halfway to them, obviously listening. Hikaru...

Jim meets his eyes for a moment, and it's strangely hard to stand where he is. Hikaru looks so torn. Silent, stoic as he can seem, but it's in his eyes. His fear for Pavel shines from him, and Jim wants to go down there and be with him.

It's an odd feeling. Jim is used to playing the strong one, the captain. But he's used to letting his emotions and instincts rule him. He's used to leaning on others when he has to. He doesn't often get the urge to play the support role for someone else.

He tears his eyes away from Hikaru after a minute. "You want to explain to me what it is you're doing, Spock?"

Spock's hands don't slow. "If my theory is correct, their method of blocking our sensors only extends through rooms, or individual buildings. Ensign Chekov, I believe, has confirmed that theory. Someone on our away team has been killed. The Maalox must regard a dead body as harmless in regards to our sensors, and it's true that our scanning the planet for human life would not register a human corpse."

"This doesn't sound like great news, Spock."

Spock glances over at him, his dark eyes glittering. "On the contrary, Captain. This harmless dead body now rests outside of the confines of the sensor-blocking devices used by the Maalox. It's true that a simple scan of the planet wouldn't trace that body, but a decomposing body will release compounds into the air and the soil; gases, carbon traces, nutrients. Things not found in the physiology of the Maalox. Things that we can locate with a simple modification to the sensors."

"If we find a spot on the surface where these compounds are, then there's a good chance a human body is in that spot." Jim gets it, turning and leaving Spock to his work, striding back to his chair. "I doubt they relocated the body of whoever it is who has died, which means when we find that body we've found where they're keeping our men."

"Exactly, captain. It will take me perhaps an hour to program the scanners to look for any compounds present in a human body that are not found naturally on Maalox, and then it's a matter of scanning the surface of the planet to locate those compounds."

It will take time, maybe days. Their orbits around Maalox, scanning in vain for life-signs, took a couple of days each, and now they have to worry about doing this without alerting the Speaker of their purpose.

But it's something, god damn it. It's a solution, and they've needed one for weeks now.

Jim sits down, flashing a hard look at the viewscreen that now shows them the planet below. "Spock, let us know when you're ready. Sulu, Fischer, plan out the most efficient route around this planet so we can get a full scan done as fast as possible."

"Aye, sir," comes Fischer's voice answering for both of them.

Jim turns to Pike, sitting there watching it all without a voice of protest or caution. He flashes a tight smile. "Thanks for backing me up, Admiral."

Pike smiles, thin but sincere. "Just find your crew, Jim. That'll be thanks enough."


	12. Chapter 12

He can't focus on Hikaru's words. He can't echo the laughter of the people around them at the table, even to manage the weak smile he can usually force his mouth into.

He can't stop thinking about what is waiting for him when he leaves here.

He has done something, perhaps. Something to anger Len, something to make Len think that his words or his feelings are false.

All he said was what he has said a dozen times now. 'Love'. But Len has stopped responding the way he used to.

Perhaps it's thanks to Kirk, to whatever he has been telling Len that made Len try to distance himself the day before. Perhaps Kirk also scoffed at Pavel and his 'love' and made Len think it wasn't true.

But that's absurd. This thing, the love, the feelings, they have always been held strictly by Len and by Pavel. The recovery, their behavior, their wounds, those are things that Kirk is informed enough about that yes, perhaps he can comment on it and his opinion could hold some weight.

But what exists between Pavel and Len, what formed in that cell over so many days...no one can comment on that.

Len smiled at him and Pavel slept beside him in his bed, like he has since Len was released from Sickbay. Pavel talked him to sleep, stroked his hair, fell asleep beside him, as they have done for days now.

But Len is still slipping away from him.

Maybe that means that Pavel is wrong, that Kirk is right. Maybe this is how things were always going to happen. If what they feel for each other came from a cell, then maybe it's doomed to fade into nothing once the cell is left behind.

Pavel's own feelings aren't changing. They aren't fading. His frantic need to be close to Len, to make sure at every moment that he's safe, that he's comfortable and fed and healthy, that has faded into something more rational.

But he still knows every single time he sees Len that he loves him, that he will do anything for him. He knows Len, every contradictory, fascinating aspect of him. Len, more than anyone, more than i_Hikaru_,/i knows Pavel and his life, his fears and his memories.

That won't go away. How can it? It is learned knowledge, not trained behavior. Nothing but amnesia can take that from them.

It is enough for Pavel. Perhaps it isn't enough for Len.

Pavel stands up after this thought, because it's horrible and he can't sit here and worry and debate with himself about it. Not when the answer lies with Len.

Hikaru looks over as he stands. "Hey, you leaving?"

Pavel nods, distracted, and takes his half-full tray. "I need to see Len."

Hikaru looks away from him fast. He doesn't answer.

Pavel doesn't need him to - he hardly needs permission. He takes his tray to the recycler and shoves it in, already thinking about how to best ask Len about all these fears of his.

Hikaru is standing there when he turns, close enough that Pavel jumps.

"Sorry," Hikaru says with a faint, tight smile. "I didn't want to say anything with everybody sitting around. Pavel..."

Pavel thinks to himself, with some twist of bitter, Len-ish amusement, a_nd you, Brutus?_

Hikaru takes his arm, leading him further from the recycler and the neighboring tables. "I'm worried about you, okay? I think you ought to sit here for one full meal. McCoy's doing okay, right? You don't have to go rushing back."

"You don't understand," Pavel says automatically. It's become an instinctive answer, but it's never less than the truth.

"I'm trying to." Hikaru meets his eyes, concerned.

He is the closest friend Pavel has ever had. He has never felt distanced by Pavel's sometimes-overbearing intelligence and his need to show it off. He hasn't ever demanded that Pavel be more social than he wants to. He hasn't pushed Pavel to go out and be young, to find someone to sleep with, to be _normal._ Not the way most people Pavel has called friends usually do.

Pavel finds it harder to resent Hikaru's concern than someone like Kirk's. But that doesn't mean his concern is valid.

"I just need to speak to him," he says, smiling at Hikaru as much as he can manage. "It isn't-"

"Pasha. Come on. You always just need to speak to him, or check on him, or take him some food or a data padd or some damned thing. Can you let it go for one day?"

The genuine snap of irritation in Hikaru's voice catches Pavel's attention. He blinks out at his friend, his usual instinctive answer dying in his throat.

Hikaru frowns at him, looking almost grim. "McCoy is getting better, right? He can't heal completely if you're still there enabling him to rely on you. I'm not a doctor or anything, but I can figure that much out."

Pavel's mouth closes over his half-formed answers. He can feel his expression freezing, his shoulders squaring.

Hikaru must see it, because he speaks more hesitantly. "I'm just saying. It's not good for you, either, co-opting his recovery like this. You should be on the bridge with me, you should be able to sit through a meal with your friends the way you used to every day."

Co-opting his recovery.

For some reason those words stick in Pavel's mind, echoing. Co-opting his recovery.

Is that what Kirk thinks? Is that why he was so close to actually warning Pavel away from Len the other day?

Do they think...what? That Pavel is going back to Len again and again because he wants to somehow feel like they're _both _still suffering? That he can't let Len heal on his own?

Pavel wasn't hurt the way Len was. He is well aware of that. Is that the only thing anyone else can see? That he wasn't so badly hurt so he must be delaying his own recovery, trying to make himself seem worse off than he is so that Len isn't the only one still healing?

How...how horrible a person do people take him for, if they think...

He looks at Hikaru, not sure if he feels betrayed or scared that they might be right.

"I am leaving," he says, his voice cold enough to make Hikaru back up a half-step. "I appreciate your concern for Len, I'll be sure to pass it on to him."

He strides away from Hikaru, moving so quickly that the door almost doesn't slide open fast enough, and his eyes are hot and dry and cloudy and he would have run right into it.

Hikaru doesn't understand. He tries, he wants to, but he doesn't. And if _Hikaru _doesn't understand, no one ever will.

God, maybe there's nothing to understand at all. If the whole universe thinks he's an overdramatic child who needs to shut up and let the real hero recover unmolested, maybe it's Pavel who is wrong.

Maybe he's making Len worse. Maybe he's taking away attention from where it belongs. Len was hurt so badly, and he'll be hurt for so long, recovering. What did Pavel go through to compare to that?

That's what they all think, anyway. Even Hikaru. 'Leonard McCoy is a saint and a martyr, and look at the little Russian baby still crying because his _stomach_ hurt.'

Maybe they're right. God, what if they're _right_?

Pavel doesn't look where he's going, and doesn't pay attention to whoever might be around him. So when a hand falls on his arm he jumps, his mind half in a dark, miserable cell, and he wheels around to face the intruder.

The face he sees isn't reassuring. That overgrown security guard, the one who's been lurking around so often lately.

Pavel takes a step backwards on instinct, tugging his arm away from the man's hand. But he stops and strands straight and faces the attacker the way he has trained himself.

"What do you want?" he asks, imperious though it's thin and wavering on his voice.

The guard, Harris – _Cupcake_, Pavel sneers unkindly in Kirk's voice – hesitates, dropping his arm to his side. He looks around, brow furrowed, as if checking for witnesses.

Pavel doesn't care. He doesn't know why some oversized violent security officer would want to come after him, but he doesn't damned well care anymore.

"You know Janice?"

Pavel blinks. His thoughts have to slow and swerve to edge onto this new path. "Yeoman Rand?"

Harris nods. He seems uncomfortable, looking around at everything but Pavel as if it's Pavel who has followed him down a corridor and pulled him to a stop.

Of course everyone knows Janice. Janice is Nyota's friend, lovely and blonde and popular, right-hand to Kirk when it comes to the administrative duties he hates so much.

There is gossip about her and Harris - there is gossip about everyone - that Pavel has heard but never paid much attention to. He does know that he's never seen the two of them together.

Pavel folds his arms over his chest and waits.

Harris lets out a breath and sets his jaw. He doesn't quite look at Pavel but he stops looking around at the empty walls around them.

"So we were going out, you know. At the Academy. Her and me." He talks strangely, halting, like he isn't used to carrying on conversations in full sentences.

Pavel frowns at him, seeing some kind of shadow in the man's eyes that makes him more patient than he wants to be.

"Anyway." Harris sighs again, scratching at his neck awkwardly. "This one night we were out in the city, during hols. Didn't either of us have nowhere to go, so we hung around the city, went downtown. You know." His eyes drop lower. His face is going pink as he talks.

Pavel finds himself focusing on his story, wondering.

"So we're downtown walking around after some movie, and these guys come up. Young little fucks all dirty and skinny like they been on drugs their whole fucking lives. Guy starts coming up on me like he wants a piece, like I pissed him off just from walking around, big as I am." He shrugs. "Guys like me get that a lot, you know?"

Pavel almost smiles. "How would someone like me know that?"

Harris seems to almost smile back, but it drops like a weight from his face. "Anyway, they were skinny little punks, but guys like that are fucking mean when they're hopped up on whatever shit they're taking. I tried not to wail on them since we used to get in trouble for fighting with townies, but one of them grabbed Janice."

Pavel's stirring sense of calm stutters. He frowns up at the oversized guard.

Harris leans back against the corridor wall, his gaze losing focus as he speaks. "I'm about to fly at that guy, you know, fucking laying a hand on her like that. But one of his punk friends gets me when I'm distracted, hits me over the head with this chunk of concrete right off the damn curb." His arm comes up, hand brushing back through his short hair rubbing at some spot behind his ear.

Pavel leans back against the other corridor, waiting with nerves rolling in his stomach.

Harris draws in a deep breath. "So I hit the ground and everything goes fuzzy, and when I get my focus back one of the dirtbags is sitting on me, you know? Got my hands pulled back and he's holding my wrists, fucking sitting right on my back. And these other three guys..."

His throat works. A vein in his neck throbs visibly. "They got Janice cornered. She's...shit. A lot of girls can fight or whatever, and that's great, but she wasn't ever one of them. She didn't know anything about protecting herself."

Pavel recognizes the shadow that's been in Harris's eyes this whole time now.

It's familiar.

Harris clears his throat. "Anyway. By the time I got my head clear enough to focus, they had her sprawled out on the ground. Had her shirt torn open and this one fucker's kissing her with his filthy fucking mouth and she's crying, and..." He shrugs. "I couldn't make myself move, my head wouldn't come together, not right away. And it felt like fucking hours, and by the time I got that junkie fucker off me and got over there to help..."

Pavel swallows, looking away from that shadow he knows so well. "Why are you telling me this?"

"Everybody knows about the shit that happened down on that planet." Harris shrugs. "I heard some of what Sulu was saying to you. He...he doesn't get it, but...that doesn't mean he's right."

Pavel's breath stalls, caught in his throat. He looks up at the dark eyes of a man he never gave a second thought to, and speaks slowly, feeling like the answer to his question will mean everything in the world. "Right about what?"

Harris meets his eyes, and it's clear, it's _there_ on his face that he does know.

"It's harder to watch," he says simply.

Pavel lets his frozen breath escape.

"In some ways," Harris adds after a moment. "For some people. Janice...she's the one that got hurt. They didn't manage to...you know, do everything they were trying to do to her. I got there in time to stop the worst of it. Still, she had to go to the hospital, got the cops involved. Had to go stay with her sister for a while just to get over it however she could. And that...I'm not saying what happened to me was worse. But sometimes having to watch it can be as bad as going through it. Especially if it's happening to someone you love."

It feels like validation, like the tiniest little kernel of understanding that is all Pavel has wanted, all he was trying to get from Hikaru.

Len is the one who got hurt. It's Len's hands that were crushed, Len who suffered hour after hour, beaten and abused and humiliated.

But Pavel had to watch. He had to sit there safe in his little cell and listen to the screams, and tend to Len when they brought him back. He had to patch his wounds and talk to keep up his spirits in whatever pathetic way he could.

He has to live with that. With knowing that the two of them were in the same little box, held by the same people at the same time, but Len was the one they targeted, and Pavel got to sit there unbothered, above it all.

He went through it all with Len, damn it. Just because he doesn't have scars to prove it doesn't make what he suffered a lie, or a delusion, or a ploy to get attention.

He draws in a breath and rubs his hands over his face roughly, and looks up at Harris.

"Thank you," he says, his voice as young as it's ever been.

Harris shrugs almost casually, but his eyes understand. "People don't get it, that's all. You don't gotta make them get it, either. You gotta come to some kind of peace with it in your own head, and that's hard enough as it is."

At least he doesn't toss the words out there like it's an easy task. His voice is grim.

Pavel nods slowly. "Did you? Come to peace with it?"

Harris laughs, a sharp kind of sound. "I still can't look at her without wanting to kill everyone in a ten foot radius of her. She got over it and I never fucking did. I kept trying to talk her into defense classes, kept growling at any fucker that got too close. Couldn't let a day go by without telling her I was sorry for letting it happen."

He shrugs, pain in his eyes that Pavel aches to see, because he knows that pain may well be his soon.

"I couldn't argue when she snapped and dumped my ass. Said she couldn't even look at me anymore without being back in that street with those shitheads, and I was turning into some crazy stalker and she couldn't deal with it."

And that must be the origin of the rumors floating around Harris. A bad breakup, Janice scared of her maniac over-protective ex, the whole crew knowing half-truths and spreading gossip and sneering at Cupcake Harris for hurting their friend.

Pavel clears the clog from his throat. "Thank you," he says again, "for telling me. It sounds wrong to say it, but...I'm glad that someone understands."

"Nah, I know what you mean. It's fucking hard being where you were, and most of these idiots around here don't think anything but a physical wound can cause scars. Just...shit, just don't let them turn you against yourself. Madness in a silken thread, you know? Fuck 'em."

Pavel blinks, and somehow finds himself smiling faintly. "Madness in a silken thread?"

Harris shrugs. "Yeah...they dress up shit they don't understand. Talk pretty about the kind of pain they never been through."

"I know what it means," Pavel says, his smile growing. "I just didn't expect to hear Shakespeare from someone like you."

Harris grins suddenly, and it's quick and oddly bright and then it's gone just as fast. "See, that's the point. Doesn't matter what people think about me, doesn't matter what they know about me. To them I'm some muscle-brained shithead who probably beat on Janice or something. Everybody who knows her hates me, and that's most everybody on this ship. But in the end I'm the one who knows my side of things, and I know...even if I didn't do right by her, I didn't do wrong. I did the only thing I could do."

* * *

He has only reached Feynman when his throat starts burning almost constantly.

He doesn't let it stop him. He drinks more water than usual, but he can still talk and he does. Len perhaps doesn't listen, but Pavel can't forget every time he wants to shut up and just sit for a while that Len still i_needs/i _this.

He is exhausted and his throat hurts, and he feels so weak sometimes that he has to simply rest his hand on Len's forehead, because stroking his hair takes too much energy.

"_My privykli dumat' ob jelementarnyh chasticah, tipa jelektrona_...I mean, like electrons..." He has caught himself slipping into Russian the more drained he feels, and that's a strange thing but it doesn't seem to bother Len. Still, he tries to switch back to Standard every time he catches it happening.

"Electrons. Sorry." He reaches for the water pitcher, but his hand falls limp a few inches away. He has to reach to get it, and that seems like a great deal of trouble right now. "I was saying," he says to the wall as Len lies heavy over his legs, "that we thought of these particles as zero dimensional objects. But when we looked at matter as strings...one dimensional..._oni beskonechno tonkie, _but only because the number is so small compared to..."

It takes him a moment to realize he's trailed off. He blinks, trying to remember where he is in the lecture.

It's rather interesting, actually, recounting the history of physics. It tells him where his blank spots are, what periods or theories, even disproved, he ought to study up on when he gets out of here. He ought to make his knowledge more uniform.

Not that they're ever getting out of here.

He doesn't believe that rescue is impossible, just so improbable that it hardly rates as a consideration.

He had hoped after speaking to Kirk, after being dragged from this room only to be stood in front of a device and crudely ordered to speak, that he helped their odds. He thought he spoke enough to tell Spock, at least, how to find them.

But it's been days, and frankly he isn't sure if that whole thing actually happened.

He looks out at the wall and feels Len stirring against him, and he remembers to speak. "_Struny byvajut otkrytymi i zamknutymi. Dvigajas' v prostranstve-vremeni..._I mean...space-time. They move in...in space-time, and..."

There is a sound, the grind of the door opening.

Pavel's words trail off, and he begins this part of the routine that his life has become. He shifts Len's head from his leg and begins the struggle to his feet, making a mental note like a bookmark in his mind, so that after he has lost this fight and Len leaves and then comes back, he'll know where he left off.

He turns to the door, squinting out at the light from outside, the large forms silhouetted in the doorway. "_Nyet," _he says, and as they get closer his exhaustion cracks and his voice gains real heat. _"No! _Don't touch him!"

* * *

Len sits there, balancing his journal and his glass of bourbon - he's allowing himself one a night for now, to make sure he doesn't fall into the bottle and let himself drown like he sometimes wants to - and reading the same sentences over and over again as he waits for the door to open.

When it does open, later than usual, his eyes snap up and he doesn't let Pavel say hello.

"Why didn't you tell me you're the one who got us rescued?"

Pavel seems tense himself, wired for some reason, but he doesn't hesitate at Len's question. He moves in, peeling off his uniform jacket and smoothing it over the back of a chair.

"I didn't get us rescued," he answers simply. "Rene did."

Len sets his padd down and eyes the kid. "You know what I mean."

Pavel moves in, settling down on the couch. "Rene is the one who died on that planet. You are the one who told me that he was buried outside of their sensors. All I did was get an opportunity to give that news to the ship."

Len scowls at his glass. "I can't fucking believe Jim didn't say anything."

"Is there something wrong with that?" Pavel flashes a wan smile. "At times I didn't know if it actually happened. I do feel guilty that I wasn't more concerned about Rene, that I still can't manage much grief for him. But in the end he did get us rescued. He and you and I, together."

"It's not that." Len frowns at the amber of the bourbon. "Jim didn't tell me. Spock had to. Jim's come at me with all kinds of..."

Pavel's slight smile fades, but he nods as if he knows perfectly well what Len will say. "That isn't the same. He feels like I'm hurting you, that has nothing to do with a message I got through to Spock."

Len looks over at the kid.

Pavel's eyes are steady. He even seems calmer than he has lately. Definitely more calm than the day before, when Len let Jim get to him and all but tried to throw Pavel out.

Something in Len relaxes to see that calmness. It's like Pavel's got some kind of new information, some kind of fresh confidence about what they're doing. And Jesus, one of them has to have some kind of faith in this thing.

Spock's voice comes to his head, telling him he ought to have faith in Pavel, in himself. But Len isn't up to that yet, he can't manage it, and he has no fucking clue why.

Pavel returns his gaze for a moment, then sighs when Len doesn't speak. He stands up and holds out his hand. "It's late, we ought to get some sleep."

Len reaches out - he always reaches out when Pavel holds out a hand, and maybe that means something as strong as faith - and slips his glass on the table as he stands up.

"You stuck around after dinner with Sulu?" he asks, trying to be casual, to not be the weak one for once. He leads Pavel around the table and towards the bedroom.

"No." Pavel smiles over at him. "Actually, I had a very long talk with a security officer, Lieutenant Harris."

"Cupcake?" Len flashes a grin back at him. "What the hell did he have to tell you?"

Pavel squeezes his hand gently, that same calm light in his eyes. "That sometimes strangers can understand you better than friends."

"Uh huh. That's all?"

Pavel shrugs. "That's enough. I needed to hear what he said, at least." He lets Len lead him through the door, but slows his steps and releases Len's hand. "If you wish to pull away from me because I remind you of what happened...you should tell me."

"What?" Len stops and turns to face him, surprised. "Where the hell did that come from?"

"You aren't silent anymore," Pavel says. His eyes are steady but his voice catches almost imperceptibly. "But there are things you haven't said. I wonder if it means something, especially now that...now that the captain is getting to you with his words about us."

Bad time to leave the bourbon behind.

Len keeps his eyes on Pavel, because he's trying to be stronger than he is. "If there's something you're waiting for me to say, might as well tell me what it is."

Pavel meets his challenge. His throat works and he draws in a breath and keeps Len pierced in his eyes. "I love you."

Len looks away.

It's instant, before he can tell himself not to. He looks away because of all the things his faith is shaky in, this one's the biggest.

It's got the most potential to hurt them both. It's the thing Jim objects to the strongest. As much as Len wants to hold on to Spock's reaction, to his soft congratulations and his words about Pavel, Jim is louder in his head.

Pavel might be right. The fact that Len can't say it back might mean something. If it does...they have to face that.

Even if he doesn't love Pavel, even if it's just need based in trauma, he doesn't want to lose him. That is one thing he's certain about enough to overpower Jim in his head.

Pavel doesn't move as Len turns away and trudges to his bed to peel off his shirt.

"You..." When Pavel speaks that calm is shaken. Gone. "You have never said it back, which I understood. But now we are...we are better. Your reason for being silent now isn't...isn't the same as before."

Len has woken up nights lately to see Pavel sleeping beside him, and sometimes his urge to reach out and stroke his fingers over that pale face is almost uncontrollable.

He's always been attracted to the kid, the way someone is attracted to a vid star or something. Attraction he never thought of realistically, because the kid was i_sewenteen/i _and Len is a bitter old man.

Love is a word he hasn't said since Joce, and he didn't ever plan to say it. At first he was silent because he simply didn't speak, because it was Pavel's job to talk and Len's job to listen.

Now he doesn't say it because Jim Kirk brays in his head about unhealthy reactions and how there's nothing between them but a cell and a month full of agony.

He opens his mouth to speak, to give voice to some of that conflict chasing itself around his brain, but he lets out a breath and doesn't say anything.

"I didn't suffer as you did," Pavel says, his voice trembling. "But I deserve to know one way or the other."

Len looks back at him, helpless against it. He can see brightness in the kid's pale green eyes. Can see fear. It hurts like a fucking knife in his chest that Pavel's fear is because of him. He can't let this kid be hurt, he can't see it happen.

Causing it...that's too fucking much.

But he can't force words to make it go away. Spock for all his support said as much: if he has to go against his judgment to indulge Pavel's feelings, than what they have is wrong.

_Okay,_ his mind fires back at him in his own little-heard voice, _but is it my judgment I'm going again, or Jim's?_

Pavel folds his arms over his chest, looking more cold and lost than defensive. "You know you won't lose me entirely if you say you don't...you can't lose me. We need each other. But I deserve...some answer. A yes or a no or a maybe later. Anything."

Len shakes his head; he doesn't even have to open his mouth to know the words won't come.

"Why?" Pavel asks, and Len's heart twists inside his chest at the break in his voice. Pavel's eyes are wild, too bright. Desperate, hurting. "Why do you stop yourself? Why don't you want me?"

It would be funny if it wasn't so fucking painful. Len's fingers twitch to reach out, his fingertips feel unnatural without Pavel's achingly soft skin under them.

He has to fist his hands to stop from reaching, from showing too clearly just how badly he wants Pavel.

"The doctor in me," he says, his voice scratching its way out of his throat, "agrees with Jim. This isn't love. It's trauma."

"_Bozhe moi, _you stubborn _idiot! _You think that I can't tell the difference?" The words want to be angry. Pavel wants so badly to be angry, but all Len can see is the pain, the humiliation.

The need shining so bright underneath.

"You're too smart not to see it," Len says, wanting to take that thin body into his arms. Wanting to soothe him, to show him that the humiliation is misplaced. But _Jesus. _"What we went through would have traumatized anyone. This...us, from the start, it's been..."

"For God's sake, Len, of course it was trauma! But trauma and love aren't mutually exclusive."

Len hesitates.

Pavel scrubs at his eyes with a rough hand. "Why can't this be both?"

Len's voice dries in his throat.

He instantly wants to be back in time with Jim, having this same argument, and he wants to ask him that last question. Jim is perceptive in a way that Len isn't, so maybe there's an easy and obvious answer that Len isn't thinking of.

His traitorous mind feeds him images instead: Pavel jogging through the ship in his little exercise shorts. Pavel's bright eyes and overly-eager gaze. The _sewenteen_ Len had to keep chanting at himself to remind him that the kid was out of bounds.

That was before Maalox, before the trauma. Whatever complicated and forbidden things he feels for Pavel began before that away mission.

But that was just lust. That was a worn out old man scoping out a hot young piece of ass that he couldn't score.

_Hikaru thinks that I'm in love with you, _Pavel tells him in his mind, a memory from the cell, the planet. That was during the trauma, yeah, but if Hikaru said those words than it means that Pavel and his best friend talked about Len before. And whatever Pavel said about Len made Hikaru think of love.

"You feel nothing for me?" Pavel forges on when Len doesn't answer, brave in his own strange way, the way Len has noticed so often before.

His eyes are bright, burning with pride and embarrassment and something so fucking base. So openly needy.

"You don't want me. Tell me, if that's the case. Don't tell me 'this must be trauma'. Tell me you feel nothing for me that didn't come from that cell and that planet. You tell me that, Len, and I will never say a word of this again. I will never..." Pavel's voice twists, breaks.

Len's hands feel strange, twitchy, like they might act out on their own. His own body is mutinying, taking Pavel's side despite his common sense and Jim's sharp words.

He shuts his eyes and drops his head. He sits down on the edge of his bed, hands falling from his forgotten shirt.

"You want to know what I feel?" he asks, his voice grounding out too sharply. "I feel weak, and filthy. I'm the last person in the universe who should be allowed to touch you. And yeah, it came from that planet. Whatever I might've felt i_before/i_ that planet, it's buried under those new feelings."

"Then you are a fool," Pavel says fast, but there's a sudden hush in his voice. "But what do you feel for me?"

Len swallows and tries to match Pavel's shameless honesty. "If I even touch you, if I get my dirty hands all over you, I'll be ruining the most perfect thing I have ever fucking known."

Pavel's voice breaks, a sob somewhere in his throat. He throws himself at Len, biting off choked Russian words in a thick voice even as he grips handfuls of Len's shirt and straddles his lap without a moment's pause.

"You are a fool," he says again when he finds some English in his words. He leans in and breathes it against Len's cheek, and its followed by the warm, desperate press of his mouth against Len's rough skin.

Len's arms twitch to hold him, but he hesitates. He shuts his eyes and groans at the impossibility of what Pavel is offering him. What he's all but begging him to take.

"Please," Pavel gasps against his skin, pressing small, frantic kisses over Len's cheek, down his jaw. "Please, I could never deserve you, but _please_."

Pavel's slim waist is suddenly under Len's hands, his shirt hiking up and his skin, smooth and pale and perfect, shivering under Len's restless fingertips.

Somehow, without one single coherent thought, Len gets them up and somehow ends up pressing Pavel to the bed. Somehow he's devouring Pavel's mouth with every shuddering inch of need that has clogged him up so badly.

Pavel meets him halfway, kissing back with a graceless awkwardness that says he hasn't kissed many people in his life. But fuck, the enthusiasm more than makes up for any lack of experience.

When Len probes Pavel's eager mouth, Pavel lets out a shuddering noise and welcomes Len's tongue as if from the very start this is the only thing he's ever needed. He _tastes_ like need, sweet and desperate and shameless about showing it.

The part of Len that still lives in that Maalox interrogation room can't come to terms with this. Someone this soft and innocent shouldn't be allowed to exist in the same universe as that room. And if he does truly exist, someone like Leonard McCoy shouldn't be allowed anywhere near him.

But god, here he is. Len is jaded to the point of occasional self-loathing but he's not an idiot. He isn't going to turn this away if it's being offered.

Len's hand slides under Pavel's loose uniform shirt and Pavel gasps against his mouth. All Len can feel is soft skin, thin lines of muscle, the angles of bones too close to the skin.

He's perfect, from the arch of his back as Len presses him to the bed to the helpless sounds that escape him when Len gives him a chance to breathe.

Pavel has fed him, bandaged his wounds, kept him going from one endless day to the next. Pavel has been his guardian, his protector.

Len's mother would call him Len's angel. Len doesn't lose himself in religion the way his parents did, but when Pavel gasps and flushes under his touch, when his cheeks stain red and his back arches and he shivers against Len's mouth, he feels fucking _sacred._

When Len's hand dips between their bodies, between Pavel's legs, there's no mistaking the erection waiting there to meet him. He palms Pavel's flesh, and the kid might be sacred but there's enough profane about him that Len can't deny himself anymore.

Pavel whines, high and broken, driving his hips up into Len's hand in mindless want.

Len can't sleep without Pavel, can't eat. He needs Pavel to remind him that he's human. Every waking moment Len feels helpless, vulnerable, weak without Pavel there.

But right now he feels strong. Right now he is giving back, being for Pavel what Pavel has been for him. His basic, clutching need to have Pavel near is matched right now by the desperate need that drives Pavel into him.

"Touch me," Pavel whispers, hoarse and thickly-accented. "Len. Please. Touch me, your skin, your hand. I need-"

It's unacceptable to think that for one moment this kid needs something that he's not getting, so Len acts fast to give him what he wants. He manages somehow to get Pavel's slacks unfastened, and his fumbling hand dips in to wrap around that impatient erection.

"Yes," Pavel breathes out, sounding pained. His head drops back, his throat bared. "Please, please, please."

Len can't look away from him. He wants to drop his head, to mouth that exposed throat, to taste the kid's ragged, quickening breaths, but he can't look away long enough. His hand must feel rough against Pavel's flesh but he can't let him go even long enough to find some lube.

Pavel's hips drive upward in time with Len's rhythmless strokes, his eyes wide and unfocused. His whimpers grow sharper too fast. There's some surprise under the pleasure as his body jerks too soon and his cock pulses in Len's fist.

Len works him through his orgasm, stroking through spatters of cum until Pavel is drained dry and shuddering like an overheated engine under his hand.

"Jesus," he murmurs, hoarse. He doesn't want to let go yet, but he stills his hand around Pavel's cock and sucks in unsteady breaths.

Pavel's green eyes are fever-bright when they open, when they look up at Len and fight to focus.

Len doesn't know if Jim's right about their mistaking trauma for love, or if Pavel's closer to the truth when he says that it's both. He does know that he'd have to be blind not to see the adoration on Pavel's face when he looks up at him in that moment.

He'd have to be more self-deluded than he is to not recognize that the same look must be on his own face. Len can argue to hell and back that he's too ruined, too dirty, too old to be with Pavel, but he can't argue that being with him is what he wants. He can't deny his body's reaction to getting Pavel off, can't deny that he's never wanted anything as much as he wants to bury himself inside Pavel and never fucking leave.

Trauma, love, lust. He doesn't know what it is. The psychology-minor in his brain knows that Jim's right about the dangers of mistaking one for the other, but there isn't a cell or an atom in him that can doubt Pavel's answer: they aren't mutually exclusive.

This thing feels so fucking complicated, so real and so deep, that Len is pretty much convinced as he watches Pavel shiver beneath him that it has to be all three at once.

* * *

"Captain." Spock's voice rings through the hushed bridge, strong and clear.

Jim watches Hikaru twist in his chair, fast as a cat. He turns more slowly, feeling this desperate expectation clawing at his gut.

It's been days longer than anyone hoped for, but just to hear the words at all are a miracle that makes Jim want to praise some fucking diety:

"I've found it."


	13. Chapter 13

He finds them both together, which is better than he hoped for. But he finds them in the mess hall, eating, surrounded by crew, which is worse.

Pavel moves through the door and approaches the table, noting how closely Kirk and Hikaru are sitting, the private grin they send each other as another at their table finishes some loud story that makes the others laugh.

Pavel's brow creases in annoyance, but he walks up behind them calmly enough. "I need to speak to you, Captain. Hikaru."

They both look back. Jim flashes a grin without hesitation. "Hey, Pavel. Can it wait? Sit down and grab a bite to eat with us."

He shakes his head, tense but confident now with the memory of Len's hands on his body, and the image of Len sleeping so peacefully first in his mind.

"I need to speak to you, and I prefer to do it in private but I will do it here if I have to."

Kirk's grin fades and his eyebrows climb up.

Silence has fallen around the table, the crew - as they so often do - hushing the moment they think they'll overhear something good.

Hikaru glances at Jim. "Come on, Jim. He's not kidding that he'll say anything in front of everybody."

Pavel smiles at that, less grim than he intended. Hikaru knows him well enough to know that Pavel isn't embarrassed by the things others are embarrassed by. It is more important to say what he has to say than to keep it from the knowledge of those around them.

He can't help but notice Nyota sitting there watching them, her eyes as sharp as ever. There isn't much she misses - he would be surprised if she doesn't already know just about everything that's gone on.

Beside her is, as usual, her best friend. The lovely, smiling Janice Rand. Pavel's eyes fall on her and his will gets that much stronger, thinking of Lieutenant Harris and his own experiences.

Kirk flashes a look back at his dinner but stands. "Okay, kid, where we going?"

Pavel only leads them out to the corridor. What he has to say won't take long.

Hikaru regards him openly, curious and hesitant and displaying it all the way he always displays everything that he feels. It is one reason Pavel is so close to him, that Hikaru is unable and usually unwilling to hide anything about himself.

The door slides shut on the mess hall and the murmuring voices within.

Pavel faces his best friend and his captain and speaks firmly. "I will no longer allow either of you to try to sabotage my relationship with Len."

Hikaru nods minutely, as if he knew what was coming.

Kirk's shoulders tense. "Excuse me, Ensign?"

"I am not here as an ensign. Just as what you are doing is outside of your duties as Captain." Pavel faces Kirk - he's going to be the hardest to get through to, the hardest to watch. But Pavel isn't scared to confront him like this.

Back in Len's quarters is the evidence of what he has to lose if he lets this go on, and Pavel is in no way willing to risk that.

"If you think that protecting the well-being of my crew doesn't fall inside my duties..." Kirk frowns at him, sharp-eyed now. "Give me one reason why I ought to believe the two of you are in a position to make unbiased choices, Mr. Chekov."

Pavel regards him. "If you will give me one good reason why our feelings alone in this crew are somehow invalid."

"What?"

"Is it because we have experienced a traumatic event?" Pavel hears his voice rising and schools himself, glancing towards the closed door to the mess. "If that's the case than you surely believe we are incapable of making any decisions. I would certainly not be scheduled to work my old shift on the bridge tomorrow, and Len wouldn't even be under consideration yet to return to his duties. So I don't believe that's it."

Kirk heaves a sigh, the hardness in his face softening into something else. "Pavel, look. There's a lot you don't understand about-"

Hikaru makes a warning sound, nudging Kirk with his arm.

Pavel two months ago would have perhaps gotten angry at that: since he is one of the two who suffered through this ordeal, Kirk can only be implying that something about him makes him incapable of understanding the full scope of things. Doubtless Kirk means his age.

Pavel is beyond being stirred to anger over that, though. The last time he let that particular rage take him he ended up yelling at poor Len as he lay there suffering. He won't do that again.

"I am old enough," he says calmly, with perhaps a bit of an edge judging by how Hikaru looks so quickly back at him, "to understand a great deal more than you think, Captain. I understand that even though you and Hikaru began sleeping together while we were missing, i_because_/i we were missing, you have not once thought of your relationship as being born from trauma. As if you are somehow free of that concern because your pain was mental and not physical."

Kirk shoots Hikaru a look, but Hikaru doesn't look back. Hikaru's surprise shows on his face, but he doesn't object.

"He didn't tell me, Captain, I am capable of observing and comprehending things around me. I can see for myself that the two of you care for each other but haven't yet said anything. I know that you, Captain, fear his walking away because he assumes that for you this is simply another fling. And Hikaru doesn't have flings, but he hasn't yet told you that because he fears your response to any threat of a real relationship."

The two of them try so hard not to look at each other that they stand unnaturally still, like statues.

Pavel would smile any other time.

"I could tell you more than you think about you and Hikaru, or Spock and Nyota, or Scotty and Gaila. Perhaps you think that a child with no history of relationships can't see things that are clear to the rest of you. I can. I can also turn that sight to myself, and to Len."

Kirk frowns. "Fine. Can you tell me without any reservations that what you two have comes from something stronger than the suffering you did together?"

"Stronger?" Pavel shrugs. "What they put Len through, and myself to a lesser extent, was very strong. I've got no right to speak for Len, to say if its impact on him was more or less powerful that my own feelings for him."

Kirk nods, grim. "Then what do you expect us to-"

"I _can_ tell you," Pavel goes on, perhaps for the first time in his life willingly interrupting his Captain, "that what we feel will last a great deal longer than the effects of what we suffered. I can tell you that the former did not come from the latter."

He hesitates, regarding Kirk. Kirk's objections, he knows, come solely from his concern for Len. He can't resent Kirk for that. But he doesn't have to listen to him, either.

"You're right," he says carefully. "It makes little sense that because of what we suffered, we would love each other. But it also doesn't make sense that two people would cling so closely if they felt nothing for each other beyond a memory of shared pain."

He looks to Hikaru, hoping his words make sense.

Hikaru meets his eyes, his expression soft. He is listening.

That bolsters Pavel. "The only thing that makes sense," he goes on, turning back to Kirk, "is that we suffered, and we learned to care for each other. Not one because of the other, but both at the same time. It's hardly impossible."

Kirk doesn't answer. He does sneak a glance at Hikaru, and seems to let go of a little tension at whatever he sees in Hikaru's profile.

Pavel lets out a shaky sigh. He isn't scared to speak his mind, even to his superiors, but this is draining him quickly.

He thinks of Len, softly snoring in his bed waiting for Pavel's return, and he draws confidence from that.

"Unless you can tell me that I'm wrong, that somehow our feelings must be unhealthy and unnatural, than you ought to leave us alone to figure out our own relationship. It isn't normal, perhaps, not the normal that we left behind when we started this mission. But that doesn't make it wrong."

"He gets worse when you're around," Kirk says, a softer objection than his last few. A true worry of his, judging by the look in his eyes.

Pavel is surprised by it, but he shakes his head easily. "No, captain. He is better with you because he knows it's what you want. You have told him from the beginning that you want him as he used to be, and so he tries to give you that. If he seems worse with me, it's because he knows that I don't expect to see anything different."

Kirk pales, his thoughts instantly and visibly moving far away from this conversation.

Pavel gives him a moment, turning to Hikaru instead. "I am not," he says, unsteady, "co-opting anyone's recovery. I simply can't leave him alone. Can you understand that?"

Hikaru nods without hesitation. "I shouldn't have said those words to you. It was knee-jerk and stupid, and I know you better than that." He reaches out for Pavel's arm.

Pavel steps in closer, flashing a small smile.

Hikaru's touch is warm, supportive as it always is. "I'll get used to things not going back to what they used to be. May take me a little time, but the least I owe you is not trying to butt in to you and McCoy's relationship."

Pavel smiles at that, wide and sincere. "Thank you."

He turns to Kirk.

Kirk looks back, eyes distracted. "I need to go see him."

Pavel hesitates, but nods. He steps in closer to Hikaru. "Perhaps I'll get some dinner after all. He's in his quarters."

He can't quite find the words to warn Kirk that he is in bed, that it's going to be obvious what he was doing in that bed hours ago.

Kirk is a grown man, he'll figure it out for himself.

He turns to Hikaru as Kirk strides off own the corridor. Hikaru grins and slings his arm around Pavel's shoulder and leads him back through the doors to the table they deserted.

There are quiet greetings, undisguised looks of curiosity, but Pavel sits silently beside Hikaru and reaches for an abandoned bowl of tapioca that Kirk left behind.

"Pavel, how is Doctor McCoy?" Nyota asks under all the greetings, soft and concerned.

Pavel can't help himself. When he looks over at Nyota he sees Janice Rand, and he can't stop himself from saying too much.

"Doctor McCoy is well," he says. "He is recovering. He's lucky, you know, that he has so many people to help him."

"What's that supposed to mean? How the hell is he lucky?" Someone down the table, an engineering ensign Pavel doesn't know, asks the question.

Pavel shrugs, looking down at his stolen dessert. "The victims of trauma have a hundred people volunteering to help them. Doctors, law officers, family, friends. I think that makes them very lucky, though it may not feel like it at the time. Compared to those who don't suffer so obviously? The ones who have to watch it happen, who suffer it along with them but don't have wounds to show for it?"

He glances to the side, and his eyes catch on Janice though they mean to slide right past. "Those people have no help. Those people have to heal on their own, if they can."

At his side Hikaru nudges his arm. "Hey, that's not fair. You have a lot of people here helping you."

Janice's skin has lost color. She is staring right back at Pavel now.

Pavel returns her gaze. "I'm not talking about myself."

"What?"

Pavel lets out a breath, looking back at Hikaru. "Nothing. I'm not ungrateful for my friends, believe me."

Hikaru flashes a smile.

The engineering ensign mumbles something that sets the people around him protesting, and as it always does talk builds up and goes on around them.

Pavel glances over just once more, just enough to see Janice staring at the table, her brow furrowed and her expression lost, distant - perhaps a year or so in the past.

He doesn't smile, though, until the doors open and a loud group of security officers come in, pushing their way past the table to the replimats. He watches Janice's eyes raise and catch on one of those officers, and follow him as he passes.

It's a start.

* * *

The door and the hideous, squealing sound that it makes as it opens are imprinted, Len thinks, in his brain. Like some kind of Pavlovian nightmare. If he ever gets off this floor and out of here and lives somehow for another fifty years, he thinks he'll still want to burst into tears and huddle in a ball if he ever hears this sound again. Ninety years old and he'll still feel it.

Such pointless thoughts, really. He has resigned himself to dying here. He hasn't been able to eat for a few days, he hasn't had any desire to force himself.

The only reason why he wouldn't welcome death instantly and without hesitation is because he doesn't like the idea of leaving Pavel here alone.

There are times lately when he hates the kid. When he pleads to some nonexistent diety that the Maalox will go after Pavel instead. When he curses Pavel in his mind, hates him, for not being strong enough to fight the Maalox off when they come in.

But he knows that isn't real. He knows that Pavel must have the same thoughts, must direct an even stronger anger towards himself. The kid's always been too solemn and too responsible.

There are times when Len opens his eyes to find himself in the middle of one of those Maalox funtime sessions. There are times when he shuts his eyes and opens them and somehow knows that he's lost hours to this grey, incoherent fog he finds himself falling into.

He's already leaving the kid alone, he's just doing it slowly.

It's amazing, he realizes sometimes, how much more a person can endure than they think they can. He thought after the first and second sessions that he wouldn't live through any more. But here he is, useless and limp on the ground but still alive. His mind is spotty, but occasionally it still functions. He has no strength, but his heart keeps beating.

He used to be a doctor, he should have gone into this knowing how much he'd be able to stand. But maybe that's not possible. Maybe to survive it mentally he had to think of things in terms of one more time, not one more month.

Pavel talks himself to sleep, Len's been aware of it happening a couple of times. He sits there and fills the silence with useless Russian words and lays his hand on Len's hair until his hand slips off and the words fade out. It's the only time Len doesn't hear him.

He woke the kid up, both times. Shifted and groaned until those green eyes blink open and Pavel's voice revs up before he's even aware of being awake again.

And this is life now.

Len doesn't know a time when any part of his body didn't hurt. He doesn't remember clean rooms or metal beds, uniforms or laughter. He doesn't remember the taste of food.

The human body is a remarkable thing, but he's ready for his to give up. Sometimes it's all he can beg for, silently, in his mind. It's all he wants.

The days pass and the hours blur and drag and melt into each other, and he doesn't remember when life wasn't like this.

Until the kid is up on his feet, shouting out hoarse Russian words, and a voice answers him. A voice Len doesn't remember but knows all the same.

A voice that says, "Chekov?"

* * *

He doesn't hear Pavel's nightmare, if the kid even makes any noise when he dreams. But he hears the soft sniffling, the muffled breathing and helpless choked sounds.

He rolls over, still feeling heavy-limped and relaxed from earlier, and finds Pavel curled away from him in a tense ball.

He doesn't hesitate, reaching out and touching the kid's shoulder. "Hey," he says softly, hoarse from sleep.

Pavel doesn't move. He stills, as if forcing himself to be quiet, but he speaks after a few long moments.

"In my dreams," he says, "you hate me for letting it happen. In my dreams when they come to get us, you tell Kirk what I've done, and you leave me there."

"Jesus." Len's eyes open, wide awake just like that. "Pavel..."

Pavel doesn't move.

Len sits up, reaching for Pavel more insistently. "Hey. Come here."

Pavel obeys after a moment, rolling over and curling against Len, burying his face in Len's chest.

God, it's so easy to let Pavel be the strong one. Len's done it without complaint for weeks now. Pavel asks for it, demands it.

Len just let himself make the mistake of thinking that strong means impervious.

He strokes Pavel's thin back, feeling tears against his skin. "Christ, kid, you know how wrong that is."

Pavel nods, the barest movement of his head. Len is more than aware that just knowing something isn't right doesn't make it go away.

"I know it's wrong," Pavel says, his voice thick. "I know they're wrong. I _know_ it. But...what if they're right?"

Len frowns out into the darkness, tangling his fingers in disheveled curls. "Who?"

"Hikaru and Kirk. They agree with us now, maybe, after we convinced them to. But..."

Len snorts softly. "Hikaru and Kirk are idiots," he answers easily, and his mind cheerfully throws Christine Chapel into that mix.

Pavel sniffles and clings to Len, and he seems more young and more scared than Len has ever seen him.

It's an answer in itself, even if Pavel doesn't realize that yet. That a kid so fucking brave can face a group of violent sadist monsters, but can sob to himself in the night at the thought of losing the man sleeping beside him...

It's the answer to his fear right there. And the answer to Len's fear, if any of that fear remains. Pavel needs him so badly that he's brought to tears by it, and Len needs him so badly that those tears seem every bit as humbling as any inhumane torture.

He was pretty sure of it the first time he stroked Pavel off, the first time Pavel lay under him, shivering and glowing and sated. He was a little more sure after Jim showed up and had it out with him about pretending to be healthier than he was because he thought it was what Jim wanted (which, to be fair, Len didn't realize he was doing until Jim said it and his mind dinged in recognition).

He was convinced hours earlier, as Pavel lay beneath him sobbing in pleasure as Len pushed so fucking slowly into his body.

They suffered together, but that's the least of what they are. Len is so attracted to him that he's felt like a pervert for months, he's so fascinated by him that even weeks in a cell make him sure that he's only scratched the surface of this kid. He i_likes/i _him, which in Len's experience is pretty rare for a couple.

Pavel has brought him his faith back, and if that faith doesn't extend any further than this bed, it's a start.

He folds his arms around Pavel, feeling his shuddering breaths, and shuts his eyes and talks, quiet. "You remember that story you told me back on Maalox?"

"You'd have to be more specific," Pavel says after a moment, and there's a glimmer of amusement in the answer that makes Len smile.

"The one about the guy who married a bird and had to go look for something for the king."

Pavel draws in a breath and nods, pulling back enough to look up at Len. "_Poydi tuda, ne znayu kuda, prinesi to, ne znayu chto._"

Len meets his too-bright gaze and his chuckle dies in his throat. "Surprisingly I didn't manage to learn Russian down there."

Pavel smiles. "It means 'go I know not whither, and fetch I know not what.'"

Len returns the smile. "Yeah, that's the one."

"Mmm." Pavel lays his cheek back against Len's chest, smoothing his fingers down Len's stomach as if to soothe...both of them, maybe.

Len slips his hand through the kid's curls again. "You said that story made you realize years ago that the only important thing was to have a goal in mind. Whether you reach that goal or not is up to fate, but not having the goal in the first place would be your failure."

Pavel nods again slowly.

"Well, you said down there...our goal was to get back here. I guess once we were back our goal was to get better." He smiles, because there's this optimism in what he's saying that he hasn't felt for a long time. "You're working a shift tomorrow. I'm going through a few tests with Jabilo. We're getting better."

"Yes." Pavel reaches for Len's other hand, his fingertips smoothing over the backs of Len's fingers.

"So who says our next goal can't be this?"

Pavel seems to hold his breath. "This?"

"Us. You and me. Seems like as good a goal as any, and you said yourself that as long as you've got a goal in mind, that's what really counts."

Pavel blinks another spot of wet warmth down Len's chest. He draws in an unsteady breath.

Len leans in, smiling into Pavel's curls. "Hell, the idea makes me feel better, because I know a genius kid like you hasn't ever failed in a goal before. Right?"

"Right." Pavel laughs, warm air tickling Len's damp skin. He hesitates, and there's a note in his voice that makes Len grin. "I suppose I can postpone my next goal. I like this one better."

Len has to ask, of course. "What was the next one?"

"To let Admiral Pike beat me at chess."

Len laughs into the darkness, pulling Pavel in tighter against him. "I love you, kid. You know that, right?"

"Of course." Pavel shifts against him, tugging him down until they're both prone against the pillows again.

He stays pressed close to Len, fingertips tracing absent patterns across his chest. As Len's eyes start getting heavier he begins to hum, the soft familiar tune of an old Russian lullaby.

* * *

The End


End file.
